


Do Not Try This At Home

by Marasa



Category: South Park
Genre: Angst, Anxiety, Depression, Established Relationship, Fighting, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Jackass inspired, M/M, Marijuana, Past Abuse, Pining, Relationship Problems, Smoking, Stan vs Craig, Welcome to Jackass, dangerous behavior, dares, stunts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-25
Updated: 2019-01-16
Packaged: 2019-03-23 17:07:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 37,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13792245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Marasa/pseuds/Marasa
Summary: A post is made that night detailing the rules of their arrangement:• Video must be taken of the event.• Video must be uploaded.• Turns will be taken; after one group uploads, the other must upload as answer to the original post. This ensures equal stunts and higher expectations with each stunt.• Don’t half-ass it; this is a fucking competition!





	1. Chapter 1

There are just some nights that you know something life changing is going to happen.

There’s an anticipation in the air and a strange churning in the bowels of one’s soul.

It’s two in the morning at a shitty fast food joint and Kenny can just feel it.

The most infamous friend group in all of South Park is sitting together in the corner of the establishment, huddled over their individual orders of burgers, fries and chicken tenders.

They're fuckin’ hungry, but the twist in Kenny’s stomach has him pausing for a moment before stuffing his face.

It’s a rush of blood, an unnerving tremble of his nerves. It's a kind of impatient waiting feeling, something Kenny feels in his spine. Or maybe it's something he just wishes he felt.

They're nineteen now and it's fucking dramatic to say, but life is passing them by.

It was always supposed to pass by Kenny and maybe Cartman but definitely not Stan and Kyle. They had a future. Stan was supposed to play football. Kyle was supposed to rule the world or cure cancer or something.

But senior year came around and Stan didn't get recruited, surprise surprise.

The fact that he was still drinking, even if not as serious as he used to, surely wasn't helping. He was never an adamant student and bad grades were hard to defend at the bigger universities.

Kyle ended up getting rejected from his first choice for college after years of hard work.

Maybe the outcome of his quest for a spot at a prestigious college hurt a little more just because it was no fault of his own; everyone was going to college now and the competition was frightening.

It didn’t matter he graduated Valedictorian. These days, who fucking didn’t?

The news of both of their fates was a surprise to everyone but even more so a surprise to them.

Their whole life was planned.

And then it all fell to shit.

One of them was hopeless, the other was spiteful. Together they decided to stay in South Park for at least another year, doing nothing but smoking the day away and shooting the shit.

Kyle and Stan sit close enough together that their thighs are touching. They share little looks every now and then that hold so much, a new beginning, maybe, but just like everything else, they kinda know nothing will come of it.

Nothing has come of Kenny’s life.

He dies frequently and no one has yet to realize it. His parents are addicts and his little sister is practically living with her best friend and whenever Kenny is sitting on the couch feet away from where his parents are getting high, he wonders if he even wants anyone to remember his deaths.

Nothing has come of Cartman’s life either.

He sits at home most days, watching stupid daytime television and dodging questions from his mom about when he’s gonna get a job. She doesn’t pester him too much, saying how she’ll take care of her baby forever and Cartman always talks about her like he can’t stand her.

All of them, the four who sit at this table, have potential. Or it felt like that at one time.

Kenny nibbles a fry. Life in this shitty mountain town is fucking depressing.

It makes him think that maybe this annoying feeling currently berating him is simply manufactured by his boredom, just him wishing that he had some kind of drive or something to look forward to.

“Whatta you lookin’ for?” Cartman asks gruffly from around a mouthful of fries. “I swear, Kenny, if you get arrested again, I'm not fuckin’ bailing you out-”

“He didn’t ask you to, Cartman,” Stan says before taking a sip of the soft drink he and Kyle are sharing.

“Trust me, no one’s on my ass,” Kenny says, still scanning the dark of night through the windows as he taps his fingers on the table, not looking for police cars, not really knowing what the heck he’s looking for.

Cartman scoffs. “That’s a fucking miracle.”

“So is you getting one meal instead of two.”

Stan and Kyle laugh at his effortless retaliation. Kenny smirks.

See? Potential.

“For real, though,” Stan says when he finally recovers, “what's up?”

Stan’s hair is a little wind blown. Tonight is as cold as any other night in South Park but the wind is really picking up and he left his hat at home. Kenny considers what, in fact, is ‘up’ as he reaches out a hand and fixes a few crazy strands of his friend’s dark locks.

“I just…” Kenny huffs, drops his hand, leans into the table. “Okay, I have this weird feeling, kinda like when you forget something, right? But I didn’t forget anything. It’s like I’m expecting something to happen.”

“That’s called anxiety and you should talk to someone about it,” Kyle says without a missed beat.

And when he means talk to ‘someone,’ they all know he means him and Kenny’s more than fine with that.

Ever the motherly friend in the group, he’s always looking out for his little pack of friends. He's a little gruff sometimes, just as sharp as the rest of them, but he honestly cares.

“No, it’s not a bad feeling,” Kenny says. “It’s-...I don't know. I can feel it in the air. Do you not feel it?”

The other three men stare at him. They blink.

“Dude, you’re high,” Stan says finally.

Kenny pouts. “I am not.”

He picks up a fry and holds it like a joint. He brings it to his lips and sucks. Grains of salt cover his tongue instead of pungent smoke.

Kenny sighs. “Sadly, I am not.”

He smoked through his stash a few days ago and has yet to procure the money to buy some more. Stan’s the one who paid for his meal tonight.

Good friend.

Kenny decides to shut up and try to enjoy his meal despite the fact that his body is twisting with a certain expectancy.

He thinks it’s because he’s been dead so many times that he’s sensitive to the subtle, supernatural shifts in the air but he swears he can feel it. It's a lightness in his stomach, it's a magnetic pull, it's fucking fate-

 _BZZT_!

“Oh shit,” Kenny spits as he stands up.

The effect of the violent sound ripples through the three of his friends: Kyle gives a deep gasp. Stan chokes mid-sip and sputters soda over his hand. Cartman teeters on his chair and nearly falls to the ground.

“What the fuck was that!?” Cartman shouts as he pulls himself back up in his seat.

Kenny fishes into the back pocket of his ratty pair of jeans and pulls out a taser.

“Thought I turned it off.”

Kenny fiddles with the power switch on the side as his friends stare at him, open-mouthed and still catching their breaths.

“You were carrying a weapon on you and you didn't tell us?” Kyle urges, a hand pressed over his racing heart.

“Is a taser considered a weapon?” Kenny asks.

There's a pause of consideration. No final judgement is made. Instead, more questions.

“Why do you even have a taser?” Stan asks from behind a napkin that wipes away the soda forced from his nose.

“My part of town is pretty rough, if you remember,” Kenny says. “It'd be best if we continued to hang out at yours or else you'll all need to get your own tasers.”

They don't hang out at Kenny’s, don't even swing by. The police are always parked along the entire street by dusk, there's screaming and yelling and meth lab busts.

Almost every night, Kenny’s dad gets drunk, breaks a car window or punches someone in the jaw and then he's gone for a couple of days, sitting his ass in jail.

None of his other friends should have to experience that and he’s glad they don’t have to.

Kenny fought off a guy with his taser just the other night. Kinda scary situation. He did get shot at some point in the scuffle and ended up bleeding out and dying in the middle of the street, but that's besides the point.

He’s pretty good with his taser and he’s only getting better.

Kenny is still standing, slipping the now locked taser in his back pocket once more. He's just about to sit down when Stan grips his elbow gently.

“You think that’s what it was?” Stan asks as he looks up at his friend. “The feeling?”

He's serious. It's as if he can feel it too. Kenny looks around the table and sees similar expressions.

All it took was a flash of 50,000 volts that had them waking up and getting sensitive to the imminent change.

Kenny bites the inside of his cheek, sits back down. “Maybe.”

Just then, the door opens. The four young men at the table in the corner all turn and look at the figures stepping into the empty fast food joint.

“That’s it,” they mumble in unison because after almost two decades with each other, they’re on the same page.

Craig, Tweek, Token and Clyde walk in. They're bristling with the cold, but also the sudden shift in the air that has them glaring at the ones already seated and eating.

They give the opposing friend group a look that speaks volumes of how unimpressed they are with them. It’s bored, dismissive.

If their expressions could be vocalised, it would be one long, ‘ _ughhhhhhhh_.’

Clyde’s the only one who looks actively impassioned. He actually cracks his knuckles as he stares them down.

They catch Craig give a small roll of his eyes and with a cool hand, takes a hold of Clyde’s chin and smoothly turns his attention away from the other group to the menu in front of them.

Both cliques don't have a good history. Whether it be metrosexual trends or quests for ratings, the two friend groups seemed to always be warring.

It was Stan and his friends who manipulated Tweek and Craig to beat each other’s asses. It was Stan and his friends who interfered with Token’s love life. It was Stan and his friends who drug Clyde to Somalia.

Craig and the rest of those guys have changed since elementary school, what with piercings and a few tattoos between them but their hate has not waned.

They seldomly show more than pure hostility to the other opposing friend group and their attitudes only inspire the same hatred in response.

Basically, it's a mutual feud that is fully shared by both parties.

“Should we get out of here?” Stan asks with a scratch of his chin as Clyde places his order with the sleepy employee behind the counter.

Kenny smirks. Stan’s always been the soft one. It's clear he just wants to save himself the headache and avoid unnecessary confrontation.

The rest of their friends would beg to disagree.

“No!” Of course it’s Cartman who speaks up, his mouth full of chewed up burger. “We were here first!”

That they were, but it sure is hard to ignore the intimidating aura that radiates from the other group of friends.

In a single file-line of piercings and skinny jeans, Craig and his friends walk with their food in hand from the front counter to the table in the opposite corner.

“Fucking freaks,” Cartman growls as they sit and begin to dig in.

Token gives a glance to their table in genuine curiosity but then Craig’s lips are moving in a soft murmur with his gaze set downward at the center of the table. All of his friends zone in on their leader frighteningly fast, leaning in to better hear him.

Kenny’s tongue sweats, his lower spine crawls, the back of his head goes warm as he watches Craig’s friends listen closely as if they are awaiting instruction on how to deal with the problem here.

There’s something in the fucking air, Kenny swears.

“Let’s leave, dude,” Stan says, sounding frustrated but mostly defeated.

They can’t even have a nice dinner together without it being ruined by those who hold the worst of grudges against them. Their bad luck is seemingly endless.

“No,” Kyle says sternly. They all turn to him in surprise.

Kyle speaks with a blistering glare at their former classmates. His teeth grit ever so slightly. “I’m not done with my drink.”

Their sour expressions are no secret and they soon gain the frightening attention of Craig himself when he finally looks up. The other man folds his hands on the table. He narrows his eyes at the smoldering gazes of the others.

“What’s up?” Craig calls to them. “Need something?”

His deep voice hits Kenny harder than a taser could. It’s all building.

“Yeah, we do need something,” Cartman spits grossly. “Eat your food and get out!”

Craig scowls. “Shut up, fatass!”

“Hush, baby,” Kenny coos sincerely to the frightening leader of the opposing friend group.

Kenny’s always had a soft spot for one of the most feared young adults in South Park.

Craig maybe looks a little like Marilyn Manson or someone else parents are just so ready to hate. He’s big into Rammstein and although he wears a few piercings and occasionally chipped black nail polish, he’s not that scary.

Kenny knows this from experience.

Tweek and Craig may be a thing, but that didn't mean Kenny couldn't slip in between them for a night or two to quench his thirst for a tall man with a lip ring.

Tweek knew. Tweek didn't care.

He got his own turn with Kenny. Their heated night together ended with the twitchy blonde panting to the ceiling, cum drying on his stomach, mumbling delirious words of, _‘Sex god, you're a fucking sex god.’_

They’re honestly too sweet.

They look a tiny bit sour though as they continue their harsh gazes. With a quick glance to his friends in silent heads up, Kenny rises from his seat and glides over to them.

Kenny has a way of being the middleman.

Formally aligned with the likes of Stan Marsh, Kyle Broflovski and Eric Cartman, he is still somehow accepted by almost every other group in town, Craig’s included.

There is no protest from the intimidating leader when the orange clad, nineteen-year-old slips into his lap.

“What’s wrong with you?” Kenny swipes one of his fries and dips it in the ketchup open on the table.

“Your friends are annoying,” Craig growls.

Kenny chews his fry, swallows. “Hmm, maybe.”

Tweek is on Craig’s left-side, licking thick milkshake from the bottom of a red straw he’s holding above his cup. Every so often, he twitches, hums, squeaks.

“Isn’t that annoying?” Kenny ponders as he watches the silver ball at the center of Tweek’s tongue swipe through cold vanilla. “A human vibrator buzzing up against your side all the time? No offense.”

“None taken,” Tweek mumbles before licking milkshake from his bottom lip.

“That’s different; Tweek’s not trying to be obnoxious.” Craig shifts his thighs under Kenny’s bony ass and Kenny takes his hand, absently tracing the inside of Craig’s wrist over the tattoo that reads Tweek’s name in black ink.

“It seems to be a contest between your friends of which one of you can be the most irritating,” Craig says as he glares at nothing in particular.

True. They were naturally competitive. Dangerously so.

Stan Marsh was competitive in the way any jock would be. Kyle Broflovski had something to prove. Cartman was simply an asshole.

And Kenny was just along for the ride.

The blonde’s slender fingers reach up to toy with the black ring through Craig’s lip. The other man raises a dark eyebrow absently but focuses on swiping a fry through a dollop of barbecue sauce.

“You complain a lot,” Kenny says with a smirk and a tug of the jewelry. “No offense.”

Craig’s smile is death. “None taken.”

A fry flies through the air and hits Kenny on his upper arm. Craig and his friends all tense up, half-standing and leaning over the table like they’re fucking ready to beat these geeks into the tile.

“Get back here, traitor!”

Eric’s standing too, pointing a meaty finger at Kenny. Stan and Kyle settle for simply glaring at the other men.

“Gotta be going, love,” Kenny says with a sigh. Craig hums boredly as the blonde gives him a generous kiss on the cheek.

“Bye, Kenny,” Token mumbles against his hand as he watches the other man retreat back to his friends.

They wanted him back so bad, apparently, but they say nothing the moment Kenny sits down. His three closest friends are too busy staring down the other group to even acknowledge him.

They can hear Clyde muttering passionately and cackling at his own jokes while the rest of his friends continue eating. Token’s voice is much lower and calm, actually talking about something other than the other group of teens.

If there is anyone who is the voice of reason in these strange politics, it's Token. He’s slow to anger and possesses the patience of a saint, although he’s firm and calls you on your shit.

Lucky that he didn't have to go to college but instead had to do a little work for his dad and basically inherit his fortune.

One would think he'd be ecstatic, but Kenny recognizes a near permanent expression of gloom on his face ever since graduating high school.

“What are you _looking_ at?” Clyde says loudly and only then do they realize they’ve been blatantly staring.

Clyde goes on to scoff at them. “Go make out with your boyfriend, Marsh.”

Kyle’s jaw tightens. Stan averts his gaze down to his food. No one at the table says anything.

The Super Best Friends are suddenly rigid beside each other and Kenny thinks maybe they'd want to slide away from each other but don't want to make it obvious.

But they know. They've always known.

It seems everyone knows, but neither of the men in question have admitted a single thing.

“Let’s get out of here,” Kyle grumbles, repeating Stan’s sentiments from earlier. He drops a half eaten fry in an unfinished basket of chicken tenders and is about to get up when the sound of chairs screeching against tile resonates within the small place.

Kyle hisses a sharp curse as Craig and his friends rise from their own chairs before they can, none the wiser that they're leaving at the same time Stan’s group was intending to.

Craig and Tweek walk hand in greasy hand to the door, already a cigarette in between Craig's lips as they step outside.

Token follows but not without an unreadable glance to the other group before leaving.

Clyde is the last out and takes the coveted role of getting in the last word.

He lolls his tongue out of his mouth, smiles devilishly and furrows his brow in such a mischievous way that has the light reflecting off of the piercing through his left eyebrow.

“Bye, losers,” Clyde spits before finally walking out of the establishment into the cold of night, shooting them duel middle fingers and a nasty laugh.

“Goddamn it!” Cartman bashes the table with a meaty fist. The soda on the table wobbles before finally tipping over. Sticky brown soda cascades off the edge of the table and splatters onto the floor.

“Good going, fatass!” Kyle shouts.

By the time they clean up their mess and have a quick fight consisting mostly of back and forth bickering, they're leaving almost ten minutes after Craig’s group has left the establishment.

The increased distance is ideal because they really don't feel up to a fist fight.

But Kenny can still feel that strange feeling in his stomach, in his chest, in the fucking wind that makes his eyes water.

“Why must my life be a fucking nightmare?” Stan says to anyone who will listen. “Can’t even eat a basket of fries without Craig and his little, metal-faced minions on my ass.”

His friends say nothing, just shuffle their feet in as miserable way as he does.

“Kenny, you got a joint you can light up real quick?” Stan requests, because he’s no longer a football player and the capacity of his lungs means nothing to him.

Kenny actually laughs. “You think I’d be sober if I did?”

“Maybe we should go the liquor store, then-”

“No,” Kyle says firmly as he stares forward.

Stan would never say he was however many days sober, but apparently it matters to Kyle.

If Stan really wanted to drink tonight, as he’s implying he very much needs to in order to forget a particular jab at his friendship with his best friend, he would.

He’s free to do whatever he wants.

But Kyle is consistent in expressing a sort of wariness when it comes to Stan and alcohol.

Kenny had only asked Stan about twice why he and Kyle were absent for about a week from school back senior year of high school and he has yet to get an answer.

Judging how right after returning, he had discreetly stopped drinking, Kenny assumes it had something to do with his increasingly dangerous intake.

Stan’s quiet and Kyle’s looking a little pissed and Cartman and Kenny give each other a quick look.

They don’t pursue the issue.

The four round the corner to the main parking lot so they can begin their walk home but it is not as empty as they had hoped.

There they stand, cool and intimidating, the smoke of burning tobacco and their own freezing breath surrounding them in an ominous haze. The red neon light of the rotating sign above them bleed into the clouds they've created.

The wind blows all obscurity away. Four pairs of eyes glistening with red stare back at them.

Kenny understands that the night is not yet over.

“Thought those weirdos went home already,” Cartman says gruffly. “Why don’t I fucking call the cops on them, huh? Probably selling meth or whatever it is Kenny and his parents do.”

“I’m done with that shit…” Kenny murmurs distractedly, absolutely taken with the image of the other group before them.

The aura around them swirls as dark as blood. The wind is crisp. His heart beats in tune with the rotation of the sign above.

“Don’t say anything, Cartman,” Stan orders, although it may sound more like a plea. “Let’s just go home.”

Cartman is still grumbling to himself, but for the most part heeds the instruction. The other group may be staring them down but Stan and his friends are shuffling around them on route home.

Kenny murmurs something then, almost inaudible.

Kyle turns to him. “What?”

“It can’t be this easy,” Kenny mumbles.

His head is turned toward Craig’s group as they begin to pass. Maybe he’s all wrong. Maybe a run in is all that this was about. Maybe this is the end of the night and whatever feeling lingers is all in his head.

“It can’t be this easy,” Kenny repeats despite his doubt.

“What can’t be this easy?” Stan asks this time.

“Ending the night,” Kenny insists with a hand on his friend’s upper arm, fingers squeezing gently, pleading.

A voice breaks through the silence between opposing groups. A shiver runs through all of them.

“If you're gonna do something, Marsh, do it.”

It’s Clyde challenging them and he looks to have the support of his friends.

Tweek furrows his dark brows subtly and sticks his tongue out just enough to tap his tongue piercing against the edges of his teeth. Token stands with his arms crossed, tall and unmoving. Craig stares mutely as he breathes out a lungful of smoke that turns red under the neon sign above.

It couldn’t be that easy. They know this for certain now.

“I don’t really wanna do anything other than go home, Clyde,” Stan says, trying to sound nonchalant. “So I’m gonna stop talking to you and go ahead and do that. Have a good night, jackass.”

He begins to take a step forward back in the direction of home but another voice is joining Clyde’s.

“Ohhh,” Craig drawls with a smirk and an ash of his cigarette in between his fingers, “I forgot you don't have a backbone. That's why Wendy dumped your skinny ass.”

In a single second, Stan’s desire to go home is erased. He turns back to Craig, striding over on sure legs, teeth grinded together, breathing a litany of growls from in between his teeth.

The momentum with which he approaches has Craig flicking his cigarette down onto the wet pavement and standing straighter as his friends fan around him in a semi-circle eager for a fight.

Stan probably would have headbutted Craig is it wasn’t for Cartman’s arms around him holding him back.

“Fuck you!” Stan yells for the first time, his resolve finally broken.

“Fuck you!” Craig answers in a voice that somehow reaches lower than Stan’s.

They’re both leaned in, noses touching and jaws tight and fists balled up at their sides as if they're gonna wail and Kenny really hopes that's not the case because if they were, it wouldn't be good.

Clyde’s a firecracker of a fighter, unpredictable and messy. Kenny’s only seen Token throw a punch once and it honestly struck fear into his heart with how powerful it was. Tweek was surprisingly strategic and Craig was versed in bare knuckle boxing and other violent street scuffles.

Mess with Clyde, you mess with Craig.

Mess with Craig, you mess with Tweek.

Mess with Tweek, you mess with Token.

They're willing to put it all out on the line for this age old feud and that's no good.

Kenny thinks fast, hand flying into his back pocket to retrieve a brick of black metal just as Stan and Craig begin to push their foreheads against each other’s.

He holds the taser up. He presses the button.

It sparkles blue.

There’s a collective pause, eight faces illuminated with the shimmer of electricity. There goes that feeling again deep within him.

It's frightening.

It’s fucking exciting.

Craig is shivering in such a subtle way that one would think their vision was warped before even considering the immovable Craig was affected.

“I bet you couldn’t take that, McCormick.”

Craig’s gaze drifts to Stan. “Or you.”

To Kyle. “Or you.”

To Cartman. “Especially not you.”

“Hey!”

“Couldn’t take what?” Stan asks while Kyle shuts Fatass up with a hand over his mouth.

“The voltage.”

The rest of Craig’s posse looks at him as if asking, ‘Are we really doing this?’

Craig’s expression assures them that they most definitely are doing this.

“Like you could take it, Craig,” Cartman challenges. Kyle opens his mouth to protest his friend’s moment of rashness but quickly shuts it when he spots Tweek giving him a small smirk.

“I know none of you could take it,” Kyle shoots back. “With all your fucking piercings, your faces and tongues would probably melt.”

“And you know that for a fact, darling?” Craig says through a deadly smile, glowing crimson red.

Kyle looks so mad, Kenny would think he was seconds away from stomping his foot like a toddler. “Don’t call me that, motherfucker.”

Craig hums lowly, a vague smile on his face and a glance to Stan standing beside the redhead.

He grabs Tweek’s hand. Tweek looks up at his boyfriend in a moment of uncertainty and then promptly turns and grabs Token’s. Token maintains his gaze to Craig’s profile as he grabs Clyde’s hand.

The other four furrow their brows in confusion but their hardened expressions soon melt into ones of nervous understanding of what is trying to be accomplished here.

Stan carefully grabs Kyle’s hand, their palms a little clammy against each other’s. Kyle hesitantly grabs Cartman’s still greasy one. Kenny takes hold of Cartman’s other hand and holds the taser up.

They stand before each other, staring.

They are two lines of young men with no purpose and nowhere to go.

They are joined as one when Clyde and Stan take each other's hand.

“Ready?”

Kenny is the voice of the excitement in the air, every bated breath, the spur in their spines that makes them want to cackle and scream for a reason they don’t understand at all.

Craig presents his hand, palm upward. Kenny presses the prongs against him, resting.

The whole circle of friends and enemies is completely silent in the anticipation, breathing heavily through their noses and staring at where metal meets skin.

Kenny can still feel it in the air.

He swears they all take a deep breath at the exact same time.

A current of white-hot electricity rips through each of their cells and every space in between in less than one second. From Craig’s palm and through the sweaty connections of linked hands, the violent muscle contraction travels through each of them all the way back to Kenny.

All eight go down.

They pant heavy breath of shock and what lingers of the split-second pain as they kneel on the cold pavement awash with red light.

Tweek leans against Craig, loose and shaking with the adrenaline still coursing through him. Craig looks down at him with a stupid smile just as shocked as his.

He sputters a genuine laugh that rattles his ribcage in such a way that has the rest of his friends smiling and laughing along with him.

Stan and Kyle are still holding hands, lightly squeezing each other’s fingers as they too smile and breathe breathy laughs. Cartman is quiet for once, looking shocked and somehow in awe of what has just coursed through him.

Kenny is the only one that fairs the best, somehow catching his breath almost immediately after the shock has passed. He’s died from electrocution about four times and that was nothing.

Seeing their reactions, though, has him snickering to himself in great fondness.

“None of you can handle more than that,” Craig pants, a thread of saliva heavy with red light hanging from his lip ring.

Stan smirks at him, still mildly wincing. “Wanna bet?”

They all look at each other and this time, they all agree that they want to do this.

Craig stretches out his hand. Stan takes it.

Despite the lingering pain, Kenny smiles.

Whatever was supposed to happen has happened. The anticipation hanging in the air bleeds away in the reinvigorating wind that spills within them and across their shaking forms.

Everything is different now.


	2. Chapter 2

The smoke shop is somewhat of an oasis in this otherwise boring town.

Hang around long enough outside and you’ll see all of South Park wander in with money to spend and walk out with pipes and bongs and papers and hookahs.

It's a rather secretive destination for some of them, the teachers and parents in particular, but the young stop by without shame.

It's become as common as going to the grocery store; it's almost a necessity for celebrating the weekend in the right way.

All cliques venture to the edge of town to get the supplies needed to medicate themselves.

Kenny walks up to the smoke shop at 11pm on a Friday night and is glad to find that the certain clique he was looking for is indeed here.

“Kenneth!” Clyde sing songs loudly.

Kenny smiles and stretches his arms out, both in celebration and to effectively catch Clyde as the goof pushes off the brick wall and hurries forward, latching onto him and trying to pretty much climb him.

Clyde’s a weird guy.

Kenny relates him to a chihuahua.

He's a little short, definitely shorter than Craig’s six-two stature and Token’s six-one, but not shorter than Tweek’s five-four.

He's all smiles always but a scrappy motherfucker ready to fight anyone who challenges him. And it's not like he had a great history of actually winning fights- quite the opposite.

Some would say he was fearless but there's something that speaks against that in the torrent of tears that spill from his eyes frequently.

Tonight, Clyde’s not crying.

His breath smells of weed and his limbs are loose as he hugs the blonde and giggles against his collarbone.

Kenny buries his nose in the boy’s hair, growls playfully against his scalp. The sensation only makes Clyde laugh louder.

“Getting a head start on your friends?” Kenny looks up and through the glass of the storefront window. “Where are they anyway?”

“Inside,” Clyde says. “They told me to wait outside ‘cause I smoked just a liiiiittle too much and they think I'm gonna break something.”

He pulls back a few inches so he can look up at Kenny. His brown eyes are wide and incredibly red.

“They got some expensive pieces in there, Ken.”

Kenny can't help but smile at the stupidly high mess in his arms.

“C’mon- I’ll make sure you don't break anything,” Kenny says. “Hold my hand and keep your other hand in your pocket.”

They walk into the shop together with the faint jingle of bells hung above the door. A wave of warmth smelling of incense welcomes them but not a single familiar face does.

Kenny guides a stumbling Clyde past short aisles stocked with intricate smoking paraphernalia in search of his friends, all the while making sure to gently slap the other’s hand away from pretty glass pieces that catch his eye.

Finally, the pair turn a corner and are pleasantly surprised to see a particular tall man down the aisle.

“Think you left something outside.”

Craig looks up from the stainless steel grinder in his hand to where Kenny stands supporting an overly affectionate and soft boy against his side.

“You know I could call PETA or whatever,” Kenny says. “Dog endangerment.”

Craig smirks. “You would never.”

A pipe on the shelf beside him draws Clyde’s attention and he’s reaching out and unintentionally knocking it to the floor with a clumsy hand.

“Dude, careful,” Kenny hisses. Clyde whimpers dejectedly.

“The back,” Craig instructs as he returns his attention to the item in his hand. “He’s tired enough now that he won’t get up.”

The shop owner must know, or have learned, that some of his customers would be clumsy enough to require a place to properly rest while shopping. Kenny hauls Clyde down the aisle to the back of the store, fighting against his dragging feet and affectionate nuzzles to the side of his head.

“I could sleep, Kenny, oh, I could sleep.”

“Wish granted, honey,” Kenny says as they come upon the small corner at the back of the store committed to a slew of bean bags.

Some of them are stacked on top of each other. All of them look criminally comfortable and smell of marijuana.

The blonde carefully helps Clyde down on a purple bean bag. He immediately sighs and sinks into the soft material, a sleepy look on his face.

“You good?”

Clyde gives him a stupid smile before leaning his head back and just floating.

The fucker looks comfortable.

Against the adjacent wall, Kenny spots a row of hookahs so decorative they look like grand pieces of furniture. There Token stands silently, looking at the impressive pieces with a look of pure boredom.

Kenny doesn't know him as intimately as he does the others of this group but he knows him well enough to recognize the recent air of apathy that surrounds him.

Life has all beaten them down in ways publicly known and seriously private, but they all know how to get their occasional kicks. They know that something to put a smile on their face, to laugh, to loosen up.

Heck, Clyde is currently smiling at the ceiling and dozing in and out just a few feet away.

But Kenny has yet to recognize that certain something that speaks to Token in a way that would bring a sense of joy to him.

The last time he actually saw Token excited about something was that night when they had all been bathed in red light, electricity coursing through them.

“You and your friends sure do like spending money,” Kenny muses with a whistle. He slides over to Token, who gives him a disinterested glance. “But I mean, if you have it, why not spend it?”

Token hums and returns his gaze back in front of him. He looks mostly immovable, almost as if he’s thinking deeply or maybe not thinking at all. Spaced out.

Whatever it is, he’s somewhere else.

Kenny gives him a friendly nudge with his elbow in a subtle attempt to engage him and bring him back. He knows how fucking shitty it is, of course he does, but he feels like it’s not his place. The least he can do is try stupid banter to try and distract him.

“You really let your friends blow your fortune on getting high? Wish I had a friend like you.”

“Craig’s got a job,” Token murmurs.

“Is that right?” Kenny awes. “Making a point to break in his first legitimate paycheck?”

Token shrugs. Kenny snickers.

“What're you doing here?”

Kenny turns to him at the sincerity of his question. His voice has gotten lower, quieter, a secret for them.

“We have business, don't we?”

This is what gets Token to stir in some way, if only barely.

His gaze shifts to the blonde. He’s searching for any sign of a joke but all he’s met with is a mischievous glint deep in Kenny’s blue eyes.

“Are you for real?”

“Your friends seemed to be for real. Are you not?”

Token doesn't answer. He maintains eye contact, now looking for an explanation or motivation.

“Are _you_ for real?”

Kenny smiles.

“I have died many times, Token. There's little I fear anymore.”

Token’s expression of speculation is offset by the beginnings of a small smirk.

“You're pretty strange, Kenny.”

Kenny laughs. “More than you know.”

Tweek’s on the other side of the store in an aisle dedicated mostly to small, fragrant boxes of hash, tobaccos and papers.

It’s a given he would be here; the guy is drawn like a ghost to all that burns delicious.

Kenny swoops in smoothly and threads his arm under Tweek’s, effectively linking them.

“What are we looking for tonight, doll?” Kenny asks.

The shelves before them hold all different brands and specifics Kenny doesn’t really care about. What he really cares about is the very bottom shelf of colorful, glass bongs.

Some look like stain glass while others look like porcelain. Blues and greens and reds.

One glows with LEDs installed in the base.

Another is pink and veiny with a darkened tip.

Surely a gag gift, it still causes saliva to swell in Kenny’s mouth.

The price tag really makes him gag and choke on the end of his arousal.

“$400!?”

“Y-You're so predictable…”

“Ah, you just know me so well.”

Tweek is warm in a different way than Clyde was against Kenny’s side.

Probably because of the twitching and ever present trembling of his body but Tweek’s a most welcoming heater tucked against him. He smells of coffee and barely of clove cigarettes and Kenny’s wearing his orange hoodie but he can still feel that warmth permeate the thick fabric and thaw his side, ribs to hips.

They’re close enough in proximity for Kenny to acknowledge how dark Tweek’s eyelashes are, as well as the faint smudge of exhaustion under his eyes that ends up looking like smudged eyeliner than anything truly ugly.

Tweek really is pretty.

“Think Craig would throw a shit fit if we kissed a little right here?” Kenny whispers sultry near Tweek’s temple as he leans in a bit closer.

Tweek exhales through his nose, smiling. “He hasn't before.”

Both of them share a light smile, rather close, but neither of them sway in enough to connect their lips.

“Gimme a smooch, baby.”

Kenny’s putting on his typical charm but it does little to impress Tweek. Maybe the fact that he isn't affected makes him even prettier.

They near closer, closer, closer and then:

“Your breath smells like vagina.”

Tweek’s blunt statement swoons Kenny in such a way that has him internally commending Craig on making such a fucking catch.

“You love it.”

Kenny leans in briefly to swipe Tweek’s lips with the very tip of his tongue. The twitchy blonde laughs, pushing him away but goes on to lick away the tangy taste.

“Tweek, you're gross,” Kenny teases lightly, coming in close to nudge their foreheads together. “Tweek’s gross! Tweek’s gross!”

Out of the corner of their eyes, they see Craig meander into the aisle. He raises a brow in silent question at the scene before him.

“What're you doing?”

Kenny stands straight again, putting regrettable distance between him and Tweek to meet a gray gaze of genuine curiosity.

“Just tellin’ Tweek how gross he is, y’know.”

Craig smirks. “Oh, I know.”

A soft blush dusts Tweek’s cheeks.

It doesn't matter how many times Kenny and Tweek hold hands or kiss or have sex; Tweek never blushes with him. But with a single look from Craig, he's reduced to a bashful mess.

And Kenny thinks that's what true love is- being with someone who makes you blush.

“What'd you grab?”

Craig comes closer, dark gaze scanning over his boyfriend’s hands for any sign of what he will be paying for with what may be his first ever paycheck.

“Nothin’ yet,” Tweek says. “I was gonna grab rolling papers. Got distracted.”

“Well hurry up, loser.”

“I am, fuckface!”

Kenny smiles and resists the urge to dote over how adorable they are. He's pretty sure if he did, though, Craig would wrestle him to the floor in the middle of this aisle.

“Tweekie likes the cinnamon ones,” Kenny says as he reaches forward and grabs a box of papers labeled ‘cinnamon-flavored.’ “I mean, they burn your throat and sinuses like motherfucker, but like I was saying, Tweek is gross.”

Tweek sticks his tongue out, silver ball glistening under the fluorescent light.

They walk to the front of the store, Token coming up one of the aisles with a semi-rested Clyde leaning against his side.

A grinder, a box of Tweek’s cinnamon rolling papers and a box of cherry rolling papers Kenny added without permission all find a place on the counter.

Craig gives the unauthorized addition a quick look but says nothing.

“Big spender,” Kenny hums against Craig's right shoulder, biting his jacket and tugging annoyingly. “Congrats on your job by the way. Where you working?”

“Don't worry about it,” Craig says.

“Don't worry my pretty little head about it?”

“Yeah.”

“Say it.”

“Say what?”

“Say ‘my pretty little head,’” Kenny urges. “Say my head is pretty.”

“Your head is pretty,” Craig sighs. “And it shouldn't worry about where the fuck I work.”

“Aw shucks,” Kenny snickers, nudging Clyde beside him. “Craig says my head is pretty.”

Clyde giggles obnoxiously.

“Here's your papers.” Craig slides the box over to him with one hand while the other collects the change the cashier gives him. “Now get off of me.”

Outside, the cool air is refreshing.

There’s a different sting to it than that other night that he hasn’t stopped thinking about.

“Goodnight, Kenny,” Craig says as he swings the bag in the direction of home. His posse gathers closer to him, ready to follow after like a line of punky ducklings.

“Whoa, whoa- not goodbye yet,” Kenny insists, stopping them before they can even take a step home.

“Kenny, I only have a little more weed left and I can't have you smoking it all,” Craig shoots back. “Maybe next weekend we can get together but not tonight.”

“I'm not here to smoke you out; I'm here to talk about our bet.”

The four across from him get quiet real fast, now fully focused.

“Here’s how it is,” Kenny begins before the jury of four. “I represent my friends and speak on their behalf as I say to you now that we are prepared to fully pursue this bet made by Craig, but only if the rest of you are on board with the challenge.”

The group takes a small pause of consideration before all shifting their attention up to Craig for any sign of direction or will.

Their leader refuses to aid them.

“Speak for yourselves,” Craig orders gruffly, and that is all the instruction he gives them.

They all look unsure and uncertain. Clyde finds the words they lack in his stoned state.

“We’re best friends,” Clyde says. “All of us. We’re in it together to the bitter fuckin’ end. If you think I'm gonna just, just lay down and let your friends destroy our reputation as better in every sense, you're fucking mistaken.”

Token rolls his eyes as Clyde yells pretty much in his ear.

“Alright, Clyde,” he murmurs. “Stop before you hurt yourself.”

“I'm in, Kenny!” Clyde shouts loud enough to make them all wince.

Tweek sighs, lifts his eyebrows in exasperation but squeezes his boyfriend's fingers where they’re intertwined with his.

“I love Craig with all my heart,” Tweek says, “but I'm not going to fight his fight.”

Kenny raises his eyebrows in surprise.

“I'm going to fight my own fight.” Tweek smiles, crooked and wide. “I'm in.”

Kenny smirks.

Token looks to his feet. He's biting the inside of his cheek, tapping his toe, blinking slowly.

“There's nothing to do in this town,” Token says lowly. “We’re not going to school. We’re not working actual careers. We don't know what we want but we know it isn't this.”

The wind blows cold. It's quiet.

Token looks up with brown eyes illuminated with the glow of a street lamp nearby.

“We used to live lives of...magic, or maybe something close to it, anyway. Sure it was messed up but it was ours. Aliens and monsters and games where we were kings and superheroes. It was an adventure. But now look at us.” Token scoffs mirthlessly. “What the fuck happened?”

All of them are left speechless at his outburst.

“I remember what we were,” he says, sounding for the first time in a while impassioned. “I want something worth remembering. I _need_ something worth remembering. I'm in.”

Kenny looks to each one of them, taking in his new opponents. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a folded piece of paper.

“May I read you the rules of our competition?”

Craig and his friends nod.

Before showing up to the smoke shop and before swinging by Bebe’s house on the way here, Kenny and his friends concocted four holy rules of which he reads now from the paper in his hands.

• Video must be taken of the event.

• Video must be uploaded.

• Turns will be taken; after one group uploads, the other must upload as answer to the original post. This ensures equal stunts and higher expectations with each stunt.

• Don’t half-ass it; this is a fucking competition!

“A Youtube channel?” Craig scoffs.

Tweek grimaces. “I- I’d d-die before I ever became a Youtuber.”

“Not Youtube,” Kenny says. “A much less popular blogging site that allows nudity and all else that is unsavory and stupid.”

They will share a single blog of which will be their online archive of whatever stunts they dream up.

Everything is on the table. Nothing is off limits.

The objective is to outdo each other and create something together that is worth remembering.

Craig retrieves a quarter from his pocket and flips it to see who will go first. With much in South Park, Stan’s group hogs the spotlight at every given moment.

The four across from Kenny roll their eyes.

“We’ll be waiting, Kenny,” Craig says. “Make it good.”

Kenny winks. “I’ll talk to you guys later, alright?”

He looks to Tweek, to Clyde. He looks to Token.

“Take care of yourself till then,” Kenny says, maintaining eye contact.

The four boys standing out front the smoke shop nod.

Before he leaves, Kenny leans in and kisses Tweek gently on the cheek.

Tweek smiles and gives an affectionate twitch toward him but does not blush.


	3. Chapter 3

As soon as he walks through Stan’s front door, Kenny is bombarded with questions.

“So what'd they say?”

“Tweek chickened out, right?”

“How did you word it?”

Kenny smirks as he shucks off his hoodie and throws it on the couch. Such ill-placement of his winter wear wouldn't fly if Stan’s parents were here but thankfully they're not.

They’re currently in Montana visiting Shelly at college for Parent’s Week. Stan has yet to visit his sister for reasons unknown but which can be assumed.

Kenny guesses it's cool that Stan has the house to himself, though. On a night like tonight, he’s definitely grateful.

The house is quiet. The air is warm. The calmness that blankets the place reminds him of the better days of their childhood.

Kenny smiles and stretches his hands high above his head as he saunters into the kitchen to where his friends are.

Stan stands leaning against the kitchen island. Kyle sits beside him on a stool with a mug of hot tea tilted to his lips. Cartman stands on the other side of the island, stuffing his face with cookies from the open sleeve in front of him.

All of them are wearing sweatpants. Kyle even has his glasses on. They look a lot more comfortable than Kenny does after bracing the cold just to do their dirty work for them.

“So,” Stan urges, more than a little impatient, “how did it go?”

“Shouldn’t even tell you.” Kenny lowers his arms as he slides onto a stool by Eric. “None of you deserve it with how chickenshit you are.”

“We are not chicken shit,” Cartman says in a spray of crumbs.

“So that's why you sent me to talk to them all alone while you guys sat here and sipped tea?”

In their defense, this was kind of unexpected.

They were supposed to be enjoying a night off from the usual stupidity they indulged in on the weekends. All of it was soulless and unenjoyable and gave a beating to the health of their lungs and livers.

Stan had been the one to inform them that he had the house to himself and to come over with a change of comfortable clothing so they could simply, ‘chill.’

The night had been progressing as they had expected, what with sweatpants and ankle socks and Stan putting on a lo-fi vinyl on the record player in the corner of the living room.

But Kenny had noticed his friends getting particularly fidgety as the hours stretched by.

They found themselves on the couch watching some shitty horror movie long after the sun had set but it was clear none of them were really watching.

Cartman thrummed his fingers on the armrest. Kyle picked at his nails. Stan bit his bottom lip with his focus set forward way past the television screen.

“What's up, buttercup?”

Stan refused to look down to where Kenny’s head rested in his lap but laid his right palm on Kenny’s forehead as a silent indicator that he had been heard.

It took twenty whole minutes for Stan to think it through before he gained the courage to mute the TV.

“So,” Stan had said, already sounding exasperated, “are we gonna do it?”

“Jesus, whenever you're ready, baby.” Kenny had smiled up at him, tilting his chin up a little so Stan’s hand squished his eyebrows down a bit. “I got condoms in my back pocket. Just tell me where and I'm all yours.”

Stan hadn't laughed.

Neither had the other two on the couch.

Kenny craned his head back in question to see that they too shared Stan’s expression of frustrated hesitance.

And in that hideous expression bordering constipation, Kenny recognized what he had been waiting for.

It had all been bated breath until now, fucking edging themselves but never having the bravery to just get it over with. It was like refusing to vomit when it was sitting at the back of their tongues.

Refusal to speak the truth was only making them sick and uncomfortable.

But here Stan was, about to utter what had been on their minds at every minute of every day since that night.

“The bet.”

There it was.

Kenny sat up. Cartman and Kyle turned to him.

“Oh?” the blonde asked coyly. “What about it?”

“Are we doing it or not?”

“You made the bet, didn't you? Why don't you tell us?”

Stan sighed, focus set on his lap.

“I did make it,” he said. “And I made it without asking any of you.”

Sometimes Stan was fucking dense.

It was obvious that the thought really worried him but he failed to realize just how pumped his friends were to finally get to this conversation.

“As if you needed to,” Kyle said as he readjusted his glasses.

Exactly.

They had been with each other long enough that they breathed the same, thought the same, bled the same.

Kenny placed his hand over Stan’s sternum and he swore their hearts beat the same.

They didn’t have patience to finish the movie. They turned off the TV and got to talking.

In the waterfall of words fallen from them collectively, they decided that what Stan had engaged in was more than a bet; it was a game.

“And games need rules,” Kyle had said.

Cartman scoffed but Kyle held steadfast to the belief that as much as they'd like to pursue this with a Wild West mentality, it would benefit them all to set up actual guidelines.

Kyle had a mind for that kind of stuff.

He approached it like a genius would, thinking through every possibility while pacing back and forth in front of the television like a madman.

“We have to tie up every end. No gaps. No loopholes.”

“No fucking cheating,” Cartman spat, arms crossed over his chest.

“Make it fair,” Stan said, hands clasped together.

“Lest our victory not taste as sweet,” Kenny added, feet on the wall and his head hung upside down off the couch.

Kyle made quick work of writing down the rules discussed aloud on a piece of paper. Cartman was little help, much too sinister in his authoritarian requirements but the rest of them balanced each other out.

Where Cartman was outlandish, Stan was realistic. Where Kyle was too analytical, Kenny offered a sense of fun.

Together, they collaborated on all the technicalities.

Kenny provided the host website. Stan provided the username. Cartman provided the password.

Kyle wrote it all down.

By the end of it, they had four rules that would suffice for whatever exactly this ‘bet’ or ‘game’ was.

They made sure to date it.

It was pretty unanimous that they would deliver said rules as soon as possible, what with their buzzing excitement by the end of the first draft.

It was like they were fucking kings laying down the law of the land before ruling over it, or have it taken over by those that they would never admit might be more worthy.

They would have texted it but that wasn’t an option when they were without the other group’s numbers. Sure they could have done some work to get them but never would they admit to mutual friends the desire to know them that well.

Kenny was the only one who would have their numbers, but his phone was crushed where he had previously fallen asleep on the train tracks.

He hadn’t felt the pain, just heard the blasting of the train horn before pleasant nothingness.

He was ultimately the one to suggest that they do it immediately the old fashion way- personally delivered.

His friends had agreed emphatically.

They had stayed sitting on the couch.

“Wait, you're not gonna go with?” Kenny asked as he pulled on his shoes.

“We’re already in our comfy clothes,” Cartman said. “I'm not getting dressed again for those idiots.”

“Just share this with them and say we signed off on it,” Kyle said.

“Is that believable?”

“It's the truth.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

With a sigh, Kyle placed a hand on his shoulder. Memories of elves and princesses and great wars flooded back to them.

“I hereby give you complete authority to speak on our behalf,” Kyle said. “Is that good enough?”

Kenny smiled as he stood from the couch.

“Don't do anything stupid, Kenny.”

“Never.”

He was about to grab the paper from the coffee table when Kyle caught his wrist.

“What are you doing?”

Kenny paused. “Can I not take this one?”

“Uh, no,” Kyle said. “This is the main ruling. Copy it.”

A pen and a napkin was forced into Kenny’s grip. He grumbled all the while copying every word down.

“I'll file the original in a safe place,” Kyle said.

“Do whatever makes your nerdy heart happy,” Kenny said.

His friends were already starting in on their half-assed goodbyes but Kenny waggled his finger as to remind them not so fast.

“I need good luck, boys.”

Kenny’s strange belief in luck had influenced his otherwise level-headed friends over the years to invest actual faith in the concept of sending positive energy out into the world as to elicit the heavenly blessing of luck that had done them well in the past.

He promptly held the napkin out to each of their mouths so they may kiss it.

Stan and Kyle gave a brief yet considerate peck but leave it Cartman to be stingy with his positive energy.

“Get outta my face,” he grumbled with his eyes set on his phone screen.

“Uh-uh, don't get fussy now,” Kenny had chided him somewhat seriously. “We need luck in this.”

“Don't ruin this for us, Cartman,” Stan grumbled.

Cartman had growled but kissed the napkin almost too fast to catch it before going back to texting whoever he was texting.

“Knock that shit off,” Kenny admonished his large friend as he pocketed the napkin. “We’ll need all the help we can get.”

“Now you’re jinxing us,” Kyle spat.

“Never my intention,” Kenny said with a crooked smirk. “I’m just keeping in mind the reality.”

“Have faith,” Stan said.

After the words were spoken, Kenny met him in serious eye contact brimming with genuine faith and yearning.

Stan looked as if he needed this and in his home, alone with his best friends, comfortable and safe, he wasn’t afraid to admit a shred of vulnerability.

Kenny leaned in to quickly kiss Stan’s lips before he made his departure. He noted the vague cold and how different it was from the heat of Kyle’s cheek as he planted a kiss there too.

Then he leaned in to Cartman’s vicinity with dramatically pursed lips, inching closer and closer to him slowly just to infuriate him.

“I kissed the fuckin’ napkin, I’m not kissin’ you!”

“A goodbye hug?”

“Fuck off.”

Kenny settled on a one-sided fist bump.

He made a dramatic boom sound as his knuckles met Cartman’s where his fist rested on the armrest. He twirled around with the force of the imaginary explosion, practically dancing in slow-motion in front of the television and all the way to the front door.

“Bye, guys~”

Kenny’s arms flailed all around and above him, still pirouetting as the door had closed.

The rest had gone off without a hitch but those who did not brave the cold have no idea.

Kyle rises from his stool and pours Kenny a mug of freshly-brewed black tea in indirect apology. The kind gesture is returned with a wink and a careful sip.

“We are not chickenshit and you know it,” Stan says.

Kenny narrows his eyes. He smiles.

“I think you’d shit your pants if Craig was here right now.”

“That pierced, crooked-toothed bastard!?” Cartman barks now that his mouth is empty of cookie. “He’s scared of _me_!”

“Craig’s not scared of anyone.” Kenny turns, jabs his index finger against Stan’s collarbone. “And you shouldn’t be either.”

“I'm not scared of any of them, Kenny. They’re fucking losers that don’t deserve any of my time outside of me beating them in this bet.”

“And you’ll do it behind the safety of your own camera, away from aforesaid ‘losers.’”

“Whose fucking side are you on, Kenny?”

“Ours. Duh.”

Kenny takes a sip of his tea. It burns the inside of his mouth but when he touches the top of his tongue to the sores just beginning, he can feel a reminder of his curse as fresh wounds knit together in supernatural regeneration.

”So they said yes,” Kyle says.

”You knew they would,” Kenny counters. “And they all said yes, everyone of them, because they’re not scared.”

“You just like to open your mouth and give us a hard time,” Cartman spits.

No one calls out his hypocrisy.

“I’m just saying don’t underestimate them,” Kenny says with his eyes set on his friends’ upside down reflections on the surface of his tea. “They’re gonna be tough competition.”

“Tough competition?” Cartman scoffs. “You really have huffed all your brain cells away.”

“They lack what you have.”

“What?” Stan asks, frustrated and confused.

Kyle turns with a furrowed brow to the two inquiring gruffly.

“It’s their lack of fear that’s gonna make hard to beat. I think that’s his point.”

“A-plus, Broflovski,” Kenny praises slyly before taking another sip.

“And what about Tweek?” Cartman says. “You’re gonna tell me Craig’s spazzy boyfriend isn’t gonna cry everytime they so much as point a fucking camera at him?”

“People change, Eric,” Kyle sighs. “He’s still anxious but not as bad as he was when we were kids.”

“And how do you know?”

“I’m observant, fatass!”

Stan huffs a groan before resting his forehead on his super best friend’s shoulder.

Without thought, Kyle raises a hand to rest on the other’s head. His fingers card through the dark strands, scratching comfortingly as he leans his head against Stan’s.

They had always been domestic in a sense. They felt more like mom and dad to the group than nineteen, almost twenty-year-old, men should.

Everyone has been waiting for them to just admit it.

After this long, there’s a sad sense they never will.

Kenny smirks and looks away when the ginger shoots him a glaring look of veiled embarrassment.

They finish their tea, share a few cookies and follow Stan upstairs to his room.

It hasn't changed much since fourth grade.

He still has the same stupid posters taped to his walls and a collection of shitty books on his bookshelf. Eric reaches down and collects an elementary school yearbook from beside a book of poetry by Edgar Allan Poe.

Kyle sits cross-legged at the computer chair. He types in the address Kenny has fed him previously.

A few clicks. A few groans.

“Most of this is porn,” Kyle grumbles.

“And that's what'll make up stand out! We’re different, we’re new,” Kenny says. “Do none of you know how this works?”

His friends hum distractedly. They're obviously not convinced by his obnoxious pep talk.

Stan sits on his bed, back against the headboard.

Cartman sits on the foot of the bed, back to the wall with a yearbook in his lap.

The past speaks to him.

He's the one that frequently brings up old memories and shenanigans they would get themselves into. He’s also the one to get genuinely angry with whoever failed to remember as greatly as he did every little aspect of the past.

There's a sense of something unfinished that radiates from Cartman.

Whatever it is makes everyone wonder for a brief second, could they have already lived their golden days?

Kenny sits beside him and traces his finger down the long row of young faces of the fourth grade class. He taps over a picture of himself, then Stan, up to Kyle, Eric.

There's just enough familiarity to be immediately recognizable but so much has changed.

Beneath Kenny’s finger, they look happy in a miserable sort of way.

Cartman looks down at the page blankly, his eyes dragging over the fourth grade class picture. He settles his attention on the front row where a certain girl in a pink hat stands tall and smiling.

Kenny searches his face discreetly for any true feeling but Cartman keeps it under wraps, as he usually does.

Looking into the past should be fun. It's mostly sad.

With gentle fingers, Kenny guides the yearbook closed. Cartman doesn't fight him but puts on a scowl before he can mention the fleeting expression of bitter regret that cascades across his face.

“Oh my God, that’s too much.”

They look up to see a particularly hardcore porno playing on the webpage in front of Kyle. Beside it are recommended strange videos of varying levels of sensuality or sketchiness.

The titles are green. The background is black.

It’s all very intimidating.

“All of this is too much.”

“We haven’t even gotten started,” Kenny says. “‘Too much,’ should sound more like, ‘victory.’”

Kyle swivels around to look at him, unimpressed, from over his glasses that have since slid down his nose.

“So you’re comfortable with the idea of being in varying states of undress just so you can say you won a competition against Craig?”

“I’m more worried that you’re not. But maybe we should pick something more level one-ish for the time being.”

They look around the room as if looking for their first true stunt written out for them.

“We could, uh…” Kyle tries, but the sentence trails off into a frustrated sigh.

The least they could have done was brainstorm while he was away making things official but here they are with their hands on their dicks and porno still playing on the computer.

Stan shifts so he’s sitting on the edge of the bed. Kenny sits in his lap.

“You still have your taser on you?”

The hard brick of contained voltage is digging into Stan’s thigh right now. Two hands hold his hips and lift him minutely as to relieve the pressure.

“Let’s do it, then,” Kyle says as he stands from the computer chair. “Bigger this time.”

The hands on Kenny’s hips tighten.

“Do what?” Stan says.

“Tongue,” Cartman says on the bed behind him, as if he were having an epiphany.

There is no bigger way to go than tongue. That will be just the right way to kick things off officially.

Now that the idea is in their heads, they can’t shake it.

Stan’s lips are parted and his eyes are wide and he’s already broken out in goosebumps at the anticipation.

“Who’s recording?”

“I'll do it, I'll do it.”

Cartman retrieves his phone from his pocket. He holds it vertically out in front of him.

“Horizontal, you absolute heathen,” Kyle admonishes as he roughly guides Cartman’s hand so the screen is sideways.

There is no question of who it will be. Stan was the one who opened his mouth; it should be open for the electricity.

It’s obvious he’s nervous. Who wouldn’t be?

Craig, Kenny thinks, but he doesn’t tell Stan that.

With the camera lined up close to his face and already recording, Stan sticks his tongue out but then takes it back as soon as so much as a draft tickles at it.

Over and over he does this, fingers tapping on his thigh and a thread of drool falling off his lips and to his jeans.

Too impatient, Kenny stands before him with his hand held out, palm upward, expectant.

“Gimme your tongue, handsome.”

Stan whines but finally extends his tongue past his teeth for real this time. It’s quickly sandwiched between a salty thumb and forefinger.

They’re all watching closely as Kenny pulls it out further past the point of cowardly return. A tongue pinched by the fingers of his right hand, a taser in his left, Kenny lets go of Stan’s tongue a second before he administers the shock.

A bright blue light bounces off the walls, a crack sounds between them.

“AH!”

They’re immediately reduced to uncontrollable laughter.

Kenny holds his stomach. Eric is leaning against the bed. Kyle struggles to not fall to his knees on the floor.

“Fuck, dude!” Cartman laughs through heavy tears.

“That was way fuckin’ better than the one in the parking lot!” Kyle heaves.

“Can’ thil ny tonguh,” Stan whines miserably with his tongue still hanging out of his mouth.

When they’ve collected themselves, Cartman emails the video to Kyle’s email. He makes quick work of downloading it and uploading it to their shared account with a brief caption.

_No more stun guns! Or at least do something new and exciting with them???_

Kyle presses, ‘Post.’

The video is uploaded.

“‘Scared,’” Eric says then, recalling the conversation from earlier. “More like ‘fearless.’ Let’s see if Craig can do one fucking better than that.”

Kenny smiles widely with his eyes set on the first ever video of this competition.

“Yes,” he says. “Let’s.”


	4. Chapter 4

Now, Craig would never say his grandpa dying was a good thing.

But it kinda was.

He didn’t know him all that well, so he avoided the hurt of his grandfather’s ailing health during the time he himself was hurting the most.

That was about the time Craig’s father was drinking more and about the time his mother was so far resigned from her family and hellish marriage that she was sleeping with her trainer.

That was also the time when the frequent fights between Craig and his father were beginning to pass the threshold of simply drunken yelling to actual physical violence.

Thomas was close to 310 pounds, broad and big. Of course he could take a punch from his eighteen year old punk of a son.

Said teen, however, could not easily take a brutal beating from a full grown man.

After a particularly bad night a year ago, Craig had ended up hospitalized with a broken nose, fractured ribs and a concussion bad enough to not only erase the particulars of how the fight started but also revert him to such a lax state that the doctor would later say he almost choked on his own tongue.

His friends and boyfriend would have been there had he been coherent enough to contact them and tell them where he was but his vision had been crossed and everything had hurt and at a time past midnight in a hospital bed his family had sent him to after completely devouring him, Craig felt truly alone.

The only human contact he received came two hours after he had woken. The nurse’s hand had been cool atop his own as she whispered to him that a ninety-one year old man with the same last name only a few floors above him had just taken his last breath.

“I don’ kno’ ‘im,” Craig rasped out with a tight breath exhaled from his bruised lungs.

The nurse had stood awkwardly there in front of him, her thumb running gently over his cut up knuckles.

Then, Craig had teared up, not because he cared about the old man dead above him, but because for the first time in his life, he felt like an alien on this planet.

“Does...does he kno’ me?”

The nurse didn’t have an answer but she had enough kindness in her heart to wipe his tears before they could fall.

A week later, right before leaving the hospital, Craig would learn that Grandpa Tucker really did know him.

The lawyer standing in the doorway had recited the note attached to the will. The grandson he had yet to meet was, ‘the only person in this damned family to not piss me off.’

Craig’s reward came as a single story house over by the train tracks.

A little dilapidated and definitely in need of a few repairs, it had sounded better than heaven to a still sore Craig sitting on the side of a hospital bed.

Following that moment, Craig swore complete separation from his family.

He would be a willing orphan, a self-made bastard.

Craig had smiled with cuts in his gums and his nose still bleeding.

The single-story home is now home to one of the most intimidating and apathetic aliens in all of South Park.

Most of the furniture is from the thrift store. The band posters on the walls were given to him by old high school friends now in prison. The Persian and Tiffany lamps scattered around the house are provided by Tweek, who knows the guy who owns the antique store in the much nicer North Park.

From what Craig understands, they smoke hookah together once or twice a month.

He has no idea what they talk about, but Tweek ends up only having to pay a fraction of the price for the extravagant lighting, so it all works out.

While Craig doesn’t mind living in squalor, Tweek devotes time to making the house not as trashy as it currently is. He’s free to do as he wants as he stays here most nights, the house now as much Tweek’s as it Craig’s.

Abuse may have been the reason Craig found himself in this decrepit haven, but Tweek was actively fleeing neglect.

“It’s like they forget they have a son,” Tweek would say whenever reflecting on the fact that even after a whole week of staying at Craig’s, he did not receive so much as a courtesy text from his parents.

“Sometimes they see me after not seeing me for two weeks and they have this stupid look on their faces like, ‘Oh yeah. We made that.’”

He’d follow this with a roll of his eyes and a quiet huff that never really told of how deeply terrible the fact made him feel.

Their other two friends don’t really come around.

Token’s mansion has a movie theater, an indoor pool and a recording studio. All Craig’s house has is stained carpet and possums in the attic.

Which is why Clyde avoids the place.

He would never outright admit his fear of creepy crawlies, but he couldn’t stop the tears that sprang to his eyes and the squeal that left his mouth whenever a roach scurried by his feet or he caught the sound of a rat chewing through wires just out of sight.

They were considering adopting him as a potential roommate but the possibility of him staying in the house for more than an hour was gone as soon as Clyde spotted a snake by the front door and promptly screamed bloody murder.

This decrepit kingdom is Craig and Tweek’s.

It’s definitely just theirs for tonight.

They’re in the bedroom tucked away near the back of the house, safe and quiet and illuminated with the dim, orange light fallen through green and brown glass of the lampshade of the lamp positioned on the bedside table.

Craig sits atop the comforter with his back against the wall. Tweek sits in his lap. Their tongues slide against the other’s with lazy purpose.

Tweek’s a devil with that ball at the center of his tongue. He’s bowling against the pins of Craig’s teeth and then he’s playing the ridges on the roof of his mouth like a xylophone.

“Talk.”

Craig’s perfected the act of speaking with his mouth full; the words said around Tweek’s tongue are not at all muffled.

“I like hearing you talk.”

Tweek’s voice is raspy and high without being overtly annoying. It sounds more like the beginnings of losing his voice or having a sore throat.

Craig considers it such perfection that he wouldn’t mind taking a break from licking each other’s tongues just so he could relish in the comforting grit of Tweek’s voice for as long as it takes him to almost cum in his pants.

Tweek pulls back. He takes in the flushed look on his boyfriend’s face before he’s parting his red lips and-

 _Brrrring_ ~

They slide their gazes over to Craig’s phone on the pillow beside them. The screen glows with a text notification from Clyde.

_DDUE T HEY UPLOADED THEYRE VID!!!!!!!!!!!_

Tweek picks up the phone between his thumb and index finger and deposits it into Craig’s awaiting palm.

Crooked teeth bite at the black metal of his lip ring as Craig logs in with the username and password Kenny gave him. They crane their heads together so they can blinks at the narrow screen overwhelmed with green text.

Positioned in the middle is a video, the thumbnail being of Stan’s face with his tongue out and a taser looming close.

Craig presses play.

Cartman’s heavy breath can be heard behind the camera. Everything’s a little shaky but their best efforts can be clearly seen under Stan’s stark bedroom light.

It’s a little weird seeing it after not seeing it for so many years. Everything looks the same pretty much but there’s something surreal in seeing the walls somehow frozen in time while its occupants have grown so much.

Craig and Tweek may hate them but they can’t help but be boredly interested by them.

The couple shares the same opinions about the group and subsequently find a strange comradery in gossiping about them, although they’d never admit that that’s what these quiet conversations were.

Tweek raises his index finger and gestures silently to the bottom right of the video where Kyle’s hand rests on Stan’s knee.

“Mm,” Craig hums knowingly.

He’s still half-hard and the video has yet to present anything more than their ugly faces, so Craig starts to nuzzle impatiently at his boyfriend’s jugular while the blonde watches the screen.

“Stop it,” Tweek murmurs with a light slap to the other’s shoulder. “Look.”

Suddenly there’s a taser in view, a blue flash, a flinching Stan and a whole bunch of laughing.

The video, no longer than a minute, cuts to black.

They sit in silence for a brief moment, unsure of how to properly react.

Craig votes the best way to react is resume with how they were before the ill-timed interruption. He leans in and returns to sucking and kissing at Tweek’s neck with nothing more on his mind than the warmth of the skin beneath his tongue.

“Ugh, it’s no good.”

Craig raises an eyebrow, pulls back.

“What?”

“The mood. It’s ruined.”

“Is ‘the mood’ even a thing?” Craig questions monotonously as he still leans forward for another taste. “I always thought that was a myth.”

Tweek scoffs, plants a hand on his boyfriend’s face and half-heartedly pushes him back.

“You’re hopeless,” Tweek sighs. “Please try and learn to recognize the mood. Then act accordingly.”

Craig pushes the hair off his forehead, looks to the wall, looks back at his boyfriend.

“I recognize the current mood as being...stressful,” Craig tries, humorous in his own dry way. “And, I could fix it by giving us a great fucking idea for a stunt.”

Tweek’s slender hand comes up to rest on Craig’s cheek. His tilts his head. His brown eyes narrow in what can be described as intense love as his lips quirk upward.

“Maybe you’re not so hopeless after all,” Tweek hums and his voice is rough in the sweetest way possible.

They’re done trying to salvage the mood. Stan and his electric little stunt has ruined it.

Both Craig and Tweek know that the mood will be back relatively soon because they’re almost twenty and their refraction period is impressive.

For now, though, they take the time to slink to the small bathroom down the hall and brush their teeth.

Tweek grabs his green toothbrush from the mason jar beside the sink, the bristles smooshed against the bristles of Craig’s own blue toothbrush so it looks like they’re kissing.

Craig stands behind Tweek and they both stare in the mirror. It’s quiet as they scrub their teeth together.

“You’re thinking,” Craig drones with a mouthful of white foam.

“And you should be too!”

Tweek tilts his head back but fails to stop watery drool from falling over his bottom lip.

It’s clear he sometimes hates his boyfriend’s aloofness at times of his overt panic.

“Anything, anything at fucking all!” he would yell in the midst of their fights with his intense desire to shake a response from him that was proof that he cared. “Just fucking show emotion for once, Craig!”

But Craig would show emotion later those nights during mind-blowing makeup sex.

Panting, moaning, actually fucking whimpering; Craig would make it up to him with that soft, open-mouthed expression as he finally came undone.

Tweek expects nothing more as he continues to brush his teeth as Craig sniffs dumbly behind him.

“What about…no, that’s stupid. We could- _agh_ , no.”

Craig remains silent. He knows that the thought of possible future stunts is really getting to Tweek if it’s making his verbal ticks flare up like this.

“Why are you so worried?”

Tweek scrubs his tongue behind, over, around the silver ball at the center of it. He pulls his toothbrush from his mouth, spits, wipes his mouth.

“Don’t try to act like what he did didn’t take balls, Craig.”

“Sure it did,” Craig says. “But it’s not as amazing and untoppable as you’re making it out to be.”

“Jealous?”

“Unimpressed.”

Tweek looks at him, brown eyes searching hazel ones for a moment before he’s smiling and falling forward into his boyfriend’s chest with a snicker.

“What?” Craig barks boredly with a scratch to the back of his own neck.

“Nothin’.”

“Mhm.”

Craig finishes in silence while Tweek holds his hand and giggles quietly to himself as he traces his finger across the tattoo on the taller man’s wrist.

Craig had been drunk one night and totally in love with his boyfriend of officially one year. He had ended up stumbling into a tattoo parlor and requesting that dreaded fucking tattoo that will live in infamy:

“Can I get my boyfriend’s name?”

He’s older now and if he could go back in time, he wouldn’t have gotten such a cliche tattoo. He initially believed an inked name of a lover to be incredible bad luck but he has since felt relieved as nothing terrible has happened between them.

Whenever he took some time to actually look at it, Tweek would laugh and say, “Dumbass,” and Craig’s chest would swell with fondness.

They’re best friends.

They’re a great fucking team.

Stan and his little idiot friends are no fucking match for the two who know and love each other this much.

“Do you have anything?” Tweek prompts before pressing a kiss to the cursive script of his name on the inside of Craig’s wrist. “Something that would be better than what they did?”

Craig shrugs.

“I don’t know. I could fuckin’...jump over a car. Walk on coals. Jump to Earth like that one guy did for that advertisement thing.”

Craig leans forward over Tweek to spit into the sink, the blonde squished against his chest and giggling. He stands back up and smiles at the reflection of his joyful lover in the mirror.

“I could ask you to marry me.”

The reaction to what has been said does not garner the desired reaction.

Tweek is suddenly done laughing. He’s no longer smiling. He averts his gaze downward to the sink, his expression deeply troubled before he’s leaving out of the bathroom and back to their bedroom.

Craig is left to watch stupidly after him, not entirely what he said to make him react in such an unfamiliar way.

He shuffles a little slower down the hall, making sure to not step on the few mousetraps on the edges of the hall just waiting to clamp down on a fuzzy neck or a furry toe, whichever comes first.

Tweek is waiting for him in their room, standing in a baggy shirt and a pair of pajama pants printed with little coffee mugs. He holds a purple controller in his right hand. He extends the gray controller in his left out to his boyfriend awkwardly.

“A game before bed?”

There’s a GameCube hooked up to the shabby television they got from the thrift shop. A few buttons are missing and to turn it on, you have to poke a pencil deep into the cavern where the power button once was.

Craig nods a little stiffly. He pulls on a black tank top and a pair of gray sweatpants and wanders over to the television to turn it on.

“Careful with Jeremy,” Tweek mumbles, one hand on the controller, the pinkie of his other dug into his ear.

The spider with a human name peeks its little head out of from the tunnel of the former power button.

“Hi, Jer,” Craig greets lowly as the end of the pencil makes contact with something in the back that makes the screen glow to life.

Jeremy disappears back into the TV.

The couple sits on the ground and plays a few rounds of Mario Kart. They’re mostly silent as they cycle through race after race that mildly inspires potential stunts with the sheer chaos of it all.

Craig drifts smoothly around each corner. Tweek struggles to keep up.

He’s usually better than this but he’s all ready driven off the side of a cliff three times.

The game ends with Craig parading around the track as first place winner and Tweek trailing in behind Peach to take third place.

Craig scratches the scum off of the controller in his hand as Tweek hangs his head down as his lips murmur silent words of internal thought. If he was anxious before, he’s more so now.

“We’ll smoke,” Craig decides aloud as he looks over at the other man.

Tweek bites his lip between his teeth .

“I won’t finish it.”

“I’ll finish it.”

They turn off the TV and return to bed.

Craig grabs his small rolling tray from the bedside table as Tweek settles in behind him.

It’s no secret that Tweek was a spaz in school- worked up, anxious, completely high strung. That was until he dialed back the coffee intake and started hanging out with a boy who liked getting high on more than just the weekends.

Craig had been there the first time Tweek had ever smoked marijuana and he was there every time after.

He wants to be there for every bong rip and joint hit until they’re old and gray.

“Thanks,” Tweek says as he takes the freshly-rolled blunt still a little moist with Craig’s spit after being baptized.

He takes an expert drag off of it, positioning the joint like a cigarette between his slender fingers rather than pinching it.

Craig smiles at the strange uniqueness that is his boyfriend.

They don’t speak a word as they pass the blunt, back and forth, back and forth. Tweek’s twitching dulls but it’s still notable enough to inhibit his deeper inhales and longer exhales.

After ten minutes, Craig turns out the lamp as Tweek reaches over and leaves the joint to smolder in the ashtray.

Quiet darkness falls over them. Craig’s skin buzzes. Cockroaches and mice scurry in the walls and he feels like he’s floating higher the deeper he sinks into the soft covers with his boyfriend still twitching at his side.

A grunt. A shift. Another jagged breath of escalating anxiety.

“Tweek.”

The blonde shoots upright in bed.

“ _GAH_!”

Craig sits up, turns the lamp back on. He looks down to his left. Tweek looks back.

He’s still trembling, but his eyes are redder.

“What’s wrong?”

Tweek balls his hands up in the sheets. His jaw tightens.

“I’m not gonna be able to sleep until I don’t have to worry about it anymore,” he says, voice a little strained with rising panic.

“You wanna do it tonight, then?”

Tweek bites his lip in consideration. His eyes search Craig’s, a little more desperate this time.

“Yeah.”

Craig throws his legs over the side of the bed. His back is slumped. His black locks are mussed even after two minutes of laying down.

“We’re gonna need Token and Clyde.”

Tweek drapes himself over his boyfriend’s back. His arms hang over his shoulders and out in front of him.

“You think they would come over?”

“They're not doing anything.”

Craig grabs his phone from the pillow and dials Token’s number. He holds the phone up between them.

“Hello.”

“Hey, Token,” Craig says. “Stan and the other idiots uploaded their video.”

“Yeah I saw it.”

“What’d you think?” Tweek pipes up, hands moving up to now grip Craig’s shoulders.

Token’s pause only heightens the suspense.

“It wasn’t bad.”

“See?” Tweek squeaks.

“But you’re not worried about us not doing better, right?” Craig counters. “Like you’re not so thrown by how ‘good’ it was that you’re lost in a whirlwind of stress right now.”

“Of course I'm not worried.”

Craig raises an eyebrow, looks at his boyfriend. Tweek sticks his tongue out at him. Craig return the gesture, if just a bit grosser.

“What?” Token asks over speakerphone. “You’re worried?”

“Not me. Tweek.”

“Sounds right.”

“Hey!” Tweek shouts as he leans over Craig and toward the phone, effectively shoving the taller’s head down uncomfortably.

Craig huffs and fights easily against Tweek’s weight so he can sit back up.

“You need to come over,” Craig says with Tweek’s arms around his neck and his chin atop his head.

“Why?”

“We’re doing our stunt tonight!” Tweek exclaims before hiding his mouth behind the cover of black strands.

“Really?”

Token doesn't sound scared, just a little annoyed.

“What are we even doing? What stunt?”

“I don’t know,” Craig says. “Just come over, dude, and we can talk about it.”

“Did you let Clyde know?”

“I’m calling him as soon as you hang up.”

“All right, be over in ten.”

They call Clyde next.

His reaction causes them to hold the phone away from them as he screams and curses in excitement that all ready exhausts them.

“Oh shit, what’s it gonna be!?”

“We don’t know,” Tweek says.

“Think of something on your way over here,” Craig instructs.

He hangs up then before Clyde has the chance to ramble pointlessly in an impromptu brainstorming session over the phone.

“Happy?” Craig says to the one still sat on the bed once he’s stood up.

“Shut up.”

They bump around the living room, picking up this and that before the boys get there. Tweek makes a quiet comment of how he’ll pick up more creamer and sugar tomorrow and Craig asks him to pick up some more cereal while he’s out, thanks.

Craig notices from the kitchen the sound of Tweek’s bustling quieting substantially until it’s eerily still, all except the rodents in the ceiling above them.

He looks up to see Tweek standing between the coffee table and the sofa staring right at him.

“What?”

It’s always Craig asking, ‘What? What is it now? What is it that I am not reacting sufficiently to?’

It makes him feel somewhat inadequate and like a bad partner but he doesn’t tell Tweek that.

“Aren’t you nervous?” Tweek asks.

There’s something to his tone that suggests that they just cut through the bullshit.

Craig dries his hands on a dishtowel despite the fact that his palms are dry.

“Do you want me to be?” he murmurs.

Tweek stares at him with serious gravity. He’s only one person, a short, skinny, unthreatening person but he manages to look at him with enough weight in his gaze for Craig to feel like he’s being analyzed by a whole crowd.

Maybe it’s just the weed that’s making him nervous.

“I just want to understand,” Tweek says.

Craig swallows.

Surely it’s the smoke still painting his lungs that has his heart hurting for a brief moment.

They know each other so well but the tension in the air is palpable.

It’s not relieved but lessened by a knock at the door.

Craig opens it to reveal Token with his hands in his jacket pockets and an all ready fed up expression on his face as Clyde bounces beside him.

“I didn’t pick him up,” Token drones. “He practically sprinted here; I saw him comin’ from down the street right toward me.”

“Must have been scary,” Tweek says as both he and Craig step aside so their friends can enter.

“Like a horror movie!” Clyde exclaims.

Craig greets Token briefly with firm grip of his hand as they pull each other in.

“Sorry, dude,” Craig says quietly.

“Nah, man,” Token assures as they pull apart. “It’s fine.”

“Weren’t sleeping or anything? Didn’t wake you?”

“Just starin’ at the wall.”

The taller men turn to see Clyde finish hugging Tweek for what may be the fourth time.

“Jesus, Clyde; you saw him a few hours ago,” Craig says.

“But I love my Tweek!”

The visitors proceed to stomp the snow from their shoes on the carpet. They flex their cold hands in the warmth of the atmosphere now blanketing them.

“Damn, you two look ready for bed.” Clyde sniffs, smirks. “Smell like it too.”

“We were in bed before Tweek started overthinking.”

“I’m sorry for actually worrying about our reputations!”

“Don’t apologize,” Craig mumbles.

Clyde slaps his hands on his thighs. The sound successfully shuts them up.

“So what are we doing?”

“I told you to show up with an idea,” Craig says gruffly.

Tweek shuffles over to Token. Token raises his arm and drapes it over his shoulder in a hug of greeting, Tweek melting into his side

“A- A drink?” he offers. “Coffee? Liquor?”

“I’m fine, Tweek. How are you?”

“Trying to get there, dude.”

Token squeezes Tweek’s shoulder. He drops his head a little.

Clyde is still nearly shaking with excitement. His expression shines brighter than the almost full moon just outside the door.

“So what are you thinking?” Craig asks.

“What are you thinking?” Clyde shoots back.

“They said no more tasers.”

“Okay, so I have a pocketknife-“

“No,” Craig says over Tweek’s worried squeak beside him.

Something scurries in the walls. All of them turn to follow the pests creating a ruckus behind the plaster.

“You really need to handle your pest problem, dude,” Token says.

“We have mouse traps all over…” Craig looks around. “All over the place...”

They watch stupidly as Craig hurries into the kitchen. He throws open a drawer unceremoniously and ravages through it viciously. His friends step further into the living room to watch his frantic movements.

Craig smiles as he reaches his hand all the way back past dead cockroaches and dustballs. His friends widen their eyes as he pulls out a bag of mouse traps and holds it up to them.

“Um, stop right there,” Clyde says with raised hand, “because mousetraps are in no way cooler than a taser to the tongue.”

“But it is,” Tweek murmurs in thought as his boyfriend approaches them.

“Think about it,” Craig says. “A taser is a split second and then it’s over. This is endurance.”

Clyde purses his lips. The metal ball on his eyebrow glistens with the green light of a nearby lamp.

“Haven’t sold me.”

“Then we’ll put more than one on him,” Token offers

Clyde smirks, looks up at him.

“All right, we’re gettin’ there.”

“Shut up or it’ll be you in my place,” Craig growls with a dusty index finger pointed at him.

Stan did it, so it only makes sense that Craig will be the main actor in this performance piece.

He sits on the sofa. Tweek and Clyde kneel on the floor on either side of him. Token sits on the armrest.

Together they sift through the bag of mousetraps in search of one not broken or completely rusted.

“I could put two on your nipples,” Tweek says as he toys with the golden latch of a trap balanced in his palm.

It snaps. He jumps.

“We need at least one on my tongue,” Craig says distractedly.

“A rat trap?”

The rat trap Clyde pulls from the very bottom of the bag is almost as big as his entire hand with jaws thicker than that of a snapping turtle’s.

“That’ll cut his tongue off,” Tweek squeaks before turning back to his boyfriend. “And I’m not done with it just yet.”

They share a look of deviousness that makes their other two friends roll their eyes.

“How about we do one on your tongue, one on each of your earlobes and a few on your fingers?” Token says.

They all look at each other, surprised by his analytical cruelty.

“Yeah,” Craig says. “That sounds great.”

Token takes the initiative and pulls out his phone, turning it horizontally without a second thought.

Clyde and Tweek line up ten traps on the coffee table in front of him. They pull the latches back so they’re ready to go the minute he’s ready.

Craig takes a deep breath to steady himself. He tilts his head back. He looks at the ceiling before closing his eyes and dropping his head back forward.

“Ready?” Tweek asks.

He nods.

Token hits record.

“All right, stupid asses,” Craig says in a voice so unaffected that it resounds with the utmost coolness. “Anyone can withstand a quick fucking second of electricity. But endurance- endurance is always impressive. Don’t you think?”

Craig’s friends nod. Their murmurs of agreement will surely be heard off camera.

“Let’s do it then.”

Token nears closer with his phone. Craig’s heart speeds up but it never affects his apathetic expression.

He pulls the gauges from his ears. Tweek lines up one mousetrap with his left earlobe and the other with his tongue currently hanging out of his mouth. Clyde holds a mousetrap at his right earlobe, smiling widely.

Craig makes eye contact with Tweek.

There’s something there that speaks to the same seriousness as earlier before everyone was here, back when anxiety had replaced excitement.

They have a whole silent conversation without comprehensible words. Craig hopes whatever these looks are won’t be picked up on camera, but the phone is so close and there is little place to hide anymore.

Craig slams his splayed fingers down on the line of mousetraps on the table.

All of them jump at the suddenness of it. The camera quickly pans in time to see the mousetraps clamp onto him with an unforgiving grip that turns the tips of his fingers red and his first knuckles purple.

Craig may be wincing but it’s overtaken with the new pain of two mousetraps slamming shut on his earlobes like a pair of fucked up clip-on earrings.

It’s lewd, fucking twisted, that Craig has to actually tongue at the little metal square with the very tip of his tongue to trigger it to shut.

There’s laughter and smiles as Craig endures the discomfort of constant pressure on each of his fingers that he holds up beside his head, currently hanging with three mousetraps.

The previous tension melts away. There is no more memory of strange reactions to offhand comments or interrupted sleep.

It’s just these four, at this specific time, turning discomfort to momentary victory.

It’s beautiful.

He shuts his eyes and he swears it’s the weed getting to him this time because suddenly a twinge of discomfort resonates deep under his heart, somewhere near his stomach, as he sees a brief flash of that hospital room he was confined to.

He smells the disinfectant. The hairs on his arms stand up with the cold of the AC that would bleed through the thin hospital sheets. He feels the beginnings of the loneliness and abandonment he felt that night he bled alone in the dark in a room that wasn’t his.

Craig doesn’t know where the memory comes from, how it arises, but the pain of the mousetraps suddenly feels a little too insistent and he’s opening his eyes and looking up over the lense of the phone camera to Token.

“Get ‘em off, get ‘em off.”

Clyde and Tweek hurry forward and pry each mousetrap hanging off his head and fingers.

“Dude that was better than I thought it would be,” Clyde says.

They’re still light with the stunt just performed. Their joyful smiles begin to quell the uncomfortable, sick feeling that had been forming under Craig’s lungs.

“Yeah, so glad you’re satisfied,” he bites back sarcastically. “I was worried there for a sec you would hate it.”

Clyde rests his cheek on his hand. He smiles.

“I know my opinion means a lot to you.”

“Shut it.”

Craig doesn’t have a computer or WiFi at his place so Token heads off with word that he’ll contact them when the video is uploaded.

“Cut that part out near the end where I say get them off me,” Craig requests quietly for just Token and he feels sick all over again.

It’s a wave and he rides it out to its bitter end, just a few seconds but it feels shitty enough to make him exhale forcefully when it’s gone.

Clyde follows after Token with a goofy salute and a promise that he’ll make sure everything is uploaded as it should be.

Tweek sighs in relief the minute the front door closes. Craig bolts it closed.

“You okay?”

Craig blinks, a little dazed.

“Yeah,” he says. “Tired.”

“Thanks for doing that tonight. Even if it was pretty stupid.”

“I did it cause I love you, remember?”

Tweek reaches out to hold his hand. He pulls it closer, looks at the red and purple marks across his fingers.

He looks like he wants to say something but refrains. Craig is more than thankful.

Back in the bedroom, Craig sits on the edge of the bed and wraps his arms around Tweek’s waist to guide him smoothly into his lap.

Tweek laughs with a hand on his chest and Craig’s heart does that weird thing that he thought no one could ever make him do.

“The mood?” Tweek challenges with a raised eyebrow.

“Exhausted,” Craig says. “My next move is to sleep with you.”

“In a non-sexual way.”

“I thought it was obvious.”

They lay down together. This time, the air is absent of any lingering anxieties and uncertainties. They’re content with all that they’ve done, so content that Craig doesn’t really mind the throbbing of his tongue.

Tweek snuggles up against Craig’s side while his left leg finds a spot across his boyfriend’s. He’s a koala when he sleeps, the thought brought about by the fact that his arm is thrown across Craig’s chest as well.

The fan hums as it turns above them and the smell of marijuana is a mere whiff. The night is over but Craig’s mind wanders as he awaits sleep to finally take him.

“Tweek,” Craig murmurs into the darkness after nearly five minutes of silence.

There's a sleepy snuffle in answer.

“I think that worked out tonight. I think it was good.”

Tweek hums tiredly in wordless affirmation.

A few moments pass and that strange feeling returns that makes his sweat feel like ice and his palms burn.

“Tweek.”

Another exhausted hum.

“What if I asked you to marry me?”

Quiet.

The sheets now feel too bulky and suffocating around him. His feet are hot and the air is too cold in his sinuses.

He smells bleached sheets and waxed tile floor.

Craig shuts his eyes.

“Goodnight, Tweek.”

Tweek doesn't say goodnight but the tightened fist on the front of Craig’s shirt says he heard him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Craig baptizes his joints


	5. Chapter 5

If Stan had to guess, he probably spends fifteen hours a week staring at his dresser.

It’s a Schrödinger’s cat sort of thing.

As long as all the drawers remain closed, the contents are infinite and endless. Stan thinks he could be a novelist, writing story upon story of what he imagines to be residing under folded underwear and mismatched socks.

He’s thought up a hundred different words for the glimmer of clear, green, brown glass, has thought up a million words to describe the foam that follows and the bitter across the tongue.

So fucking bitter.

Stan may spend much time fantasizing but he ultimately knows nothing is in his drawer. He just likes to imagine.

And imagining is the same as fantasizing, whether it be of sex or some embarrassing desire- it’s private and woven with shame.

To admit where his mind wanders is to admit that he is not yet better.

Their friend group of four gets along so well because as long as they’re together, their problems are replaced with stupid conversation and dumb jokes and terrible weed.

There are times Stan wants to talk to them about what he wishes was inside his drawer but he can’t bring himself to address his problems to those who have their own.

Maybe the silence is better.

Stan sits on the edge of his bed with his eyes set on his dresser. He doesn’t look at the clock but he’s convinced it’s been at least forty-five minutes of him just staring.

He can vaguely hear murmurs from downstairs, the closing of cabinets and the running water of the kitchen sink.

Stan’s parents just got back in town a day ago and he still has yet to have a conversation with them, never mind his private problems.

He had been there when they first walked in through the front door, although, his presence hadn’t been intentional.

Stan rose from the sofa with a weak smile and wide eyes as he tried his best to look like he hadn’t been napping.

He hugged his mother briefly, smiled at his dad. They exchanged quick words with him of how the flight was and how great the weekend was and then Stan was slipping upstairs before they could engage him in anything more complex.

It’s just not in him.

He can’t muster the energy to passively fight with them like he usually does. It’s always some snide comment, some backhanded compliment, a look of annoyance that doesn’t line up with their benign words.

His friends call each other out on that shit but there’s no way to call out the ones letting you live in their house for free, not in college, jobless, a disappointment.

They don’t have to outright say he is; Stan knows how they feel about him.

The silence of the weekend was difficult but now that his parents are back, Stan is wishing for solitude.

“Stan! Dinner!”

He looks in the direction of the door. He looks back at his dresser.

It doesn’t matter how long he stares. Adamant eyesight isn’t enough to manifest his demons, his savior, in the depths of his underwear drawer.

“Stanley!”

He hangs his head with a sigh.

Stan can smell chicken and steamed vegetables as he trudges down the staircase.

He’s not that hungry but he doesn’t want to have the conversation about his aversion to eat at times of high stress, so he presses discreetly at the tender spots of his stomach and prays that he can swallow something tonight without gagging.

“Hat off at the table,” his mother reminds him as Stan passes the kitchen to sit at his spot at the table.

He doesn’t take off his hat.

Randy is all ready sitting at the head of the table. His plate in front of him is overflowing with food. The bottle of beer beside his hand is half-empty.

Both sights make Stan nauseas for different reasons.

His mother serves Stan his plate and sits across from him with her own. They say a quick prayer, of which Stan mouths silently, and then begins the screeching of knives and forks on their plates.

“How was everything while we were away?” his mother asks.

“Fine.”

“Did you have the boys over?”

“Yeah.”

The silence that follows is awkward.

Stan glances up at his parents from below his brow to see the both of them looking intently at their own plates as they cut up chicken.

“How was it?” Stan murmurs as he taps a piece of asparagus with the tip of his fork.

“Hm?”

“The trip. How was Montana?”

“Great,” Sharon says. “The campus was beautiful. Well, it’s always beautiful, but especially at this time of year. One of the buildings on the east side of campus was closed off because it was under construction. I think they’re adding adding an indoor pool.”

“I thought they already had an indoor pool,” Stan says.

“This one’s more recreational,” Randy butts in before swallowing the vegetables in his mouth. “Shelly’s RA said it’ll have a lazy river.”

“Lazy river,” Stan scoffs quietly.

He takes a sip of water while his dad rambles on something about how he told Shelly that maybe they can go swimming in it next time they visit.

The chicken is bland. It’s mostly dry.

Stan wishes the tenderness of his stomach was a virus but he knows it’s not.

“And your sister’s doing great,” Randy says even though Stan didn’t ask.

They never got along.

Time doesn’t change as much as he’s been told it does. What annoyed them ten years ago about each other still annoys them now.

The distance is good for them, he thinks, because at least then they don’t have to get into shouting matches all the fucking time.

Stan rarely ever calls his sister. The last time he did was when he was too high to remember how switch the TV from recordings over to Netflix.

She helped him but then had told him that she couldn’t believe her little brother was such a stoner loser.

He had hung up on her before she could hang up on him.

So, _ha_.

“Shelly’s getting good grades and she’s applying for another scholarship in spring for a summer program,” his father continues. “And she’s got herself a boyfriend.”

“Your sister’s also joined an organization through school that goes around the world and builds wells in impoverished villages in need of fresh drinking water,” his mother says, unknowingly relentless. “She’ll be going to Guatemala in a few months.”

Stan stabs a piece of asparagus with his fork.

“Y'know you should join something like that, Stan,” his dad says. “Help others in need instead of sitting around.”

His mother stays quiet, not out of solidarity but because it looks like she really doesn’t understand any other reaction than contentment or elation at the suggestion.

“How?” Stan mumbles.

“What?”

He doesn’t look up from his plate.

“How would I become part of something like that? Shelly does it through school. She uses school funding. How would I do something like that?”

“Well I don’t know, Stanley,” Randy says. “Why don’t you look it up?”

“And scholarships are always available,” Sharon adds. “Search how to apply for them.”

There’s a pause that only Stan considers tense before his mom is asking him if he’s going to take his hat off.

“My ears are cold,” he says, quiet, sharp.

“It’s warm in here,” Randy says and then finishes his beer in three gulps.

They eat in silence for a few minutes until it’s broken again by things he does not want to talk about.

“Are you going to start working soon?” Randy asks.

“I’m taking a year off of school.”

“Taking a year off of school doesn’t mean taking a year off of work.”

“Where would I work?”

“Dammit, Stan, do you want us to do all the work for you? Go out and look for something.”

Stan grinds his teeth together. His knuckles turn white around his fork.

“But _where_ do I look? Where do you want me to look? Because wherever I look won't be good enough.”

“Go down to the stores on Main and ask if they’re hiring,” his mom says.

She sounds fed up.

“Take a bunch of resumes and just start handing them out to every place you go into,” his dad says.

Stan keeps his eyes down, but his voice begins to rise.

“And put what on them?”

“Your qualifications. Your accomplishments,” Randy says. “You know what a resume is.”

“What accomplishments though?” Stan barks, looking up at his parents. “All the shit from high school that doesn’t fucking matter anymore?”

“Stanley!” his mother gasps with a brow furrowed in disbelief. “Don’t ever swear at the dinner table. And take your hat off right now.”

“Take the damn hat off!” Randy shouts.

Stan rips the hat from his head and throws it down onto his plate.

He’s shaking as he stands from his chair. His breath comes in frustrated huffs of buried fury. He refuses to look up.

His parents don’t try to stop him as he storms up the stairs.

Stan slams the door to his room without any regard for the fight that will surely result from it. He paces with the energy of too many feuding emotions.

A part of him wishes to destroy everything in the entire house. Another part of him wants to cry at his parents feet and ask them why they don’t love him anymore.

There’s a part of him that wants to hide from the world. There’s a part of him that wants to hide from himself.

Stan places the palm of his hand over his right pocket so he can feel the outline of the bills adding up to twenty-five dollars. He has to force himself to move his fingers over to his back pocket so he can retrieve his phone.

“Hey,” Kyle answers after only two rings. “How was dinner? Parents okay?”

“Kyle.”

A beat of silence.

“What?”

Stan’s hands are shaking. His stomach hurts so bad.

“Stan,” Kyle says. “What’s going on?”

“Can we meet up?”

“Where?”

“I can come to your house? I don’t know.”

“Of course, dude, come over. Did you already have dinner?”

“I’m not hungry.”

“You ate?”

“I’m not hungry.”

Stan doesn’t mention how thirsty he is.

“Do you have money?”

Pause.

“Yeah.”

“Leave the money before you go, Stan.” It hurts Stan’s heart to hear the hidden panic in his best friend’s voice. “Should I pick you up?”

“I need the fresh air,” he mumbles.

“Okay. That’s fine. Just leave the money on your desk before you go. Leave your wallet.”

“I am.”

He takes the money from his pocket and deposits it into his desk drawer.

It’s harder than it should be. He hates the fact that it is.

“I’ll see you in a bit, okay?” Kyle says. “Do you want me to stay on the line?”

“I’m hanging up.”

“Okay. I’m waiting for you.”

“Thanks.”

Stan’s parents aren’t sitting at the table when he goes downstairs. He hurries out the door before he sees them, exhaling in relief at the crisis averted when he makes it onto the street.

The walk to Kyle’s house is quiet.

South Park feels like a ghost town once the sun’s set. The cold wind blows a soft dust of snow from the ground. It pelts against his pants and jacket with a sort soothing bite.

Stan’s hair tangles with each breeze.

His ears are freezing.

A wood post fence marks the halfway point to Kyle’s. Stan leans against it. He rests his chin on the back of his chapped hands.

Snow covers the ground under the cows’ hooves. They wander aimlessly as they wait to be taken inside the barn. It’ll be warm for them soon, but for now, they’re content to stand in the cold and darkness of night only illuminated by the reflection of the moon off thin clouds.

“I used to wear your faces on my football uniform,” Stan says, as if that means anything to them.

It doesn’t mean much to him anymore. He only says this aloud so he can affirm in his memory what he considers to be the best time in his life. And it’s weird because he didn’t know it was the best until it had passed.

But that’s the past, someone he was.

It’s only been a year but time feels like it’s moving so much faster.

The cows look up, blink at the sound of his voice interrupting the serene evening but then they go on with their lives, trudging on knobby legs, swinging their rope-like tails, flapping their ears.

Stan watches them and counts each of his deep breaths until his nose runs and his throat hurts.

Kyle opens the front door a little too fast after Stan gives it a weak knock.

He looks kind of worried, but it’s clear he’s trying to hide the extent of it.

Kyle makes eye contact with Stan.

He looks up at his hair.

“Where’s your hat?”

Stan simply walks past Kyle. Inside, it’s quiet. The lamps are on. It smells like a cinnamon candle and fabric softener.

Safe.

“We just finished dinner,” Kyle says as he closes the door. “Are you sure you don’t want anything? We have mash potatoes. Green beans.”

“I don’t feel good,” Stan murmurs.

Kyle comes around in front of him. He looks him up and down, nods.

“Okay.”

Stan’s stare affirms the unspoken question Kyle poses. Super Best Friends can do that sort of thing- communicate telepathically.

Kyle takes a step cloeer and wraps his arms around Stan’s shoulders.

It’s warmer than the heater pumping out into this living room. It’s better than a cashmere blanket. Stan didn’t know he was close to tears but he feels like he’s definitely close now.

Kyle always said it was okay to cry.

Stan still has yet to give in because he doesn’t believe he has a right to.

He bites his tongue as he rests his chin on Kyle’s shoulder, blinks his eyes furiously, swallows pathetically past the frustrating knot in his throat that scares him.

 _‘I’m okay, I’m okay,_ ’ he mouths silently to himself when he feels like he’s about to lose it. ‘ _I’m okay.’_

Kyle tries to pull back but Stan keeps him there for a little while longer, maybe because he needs it, maybe because he knows if Kyle were to pull back now, he’d see Stan’s eyes were red and watery.

“It’s Friday night,” Kyle says against the bare skin of Stan’s shoulder that his shirt and jacket fail to cover. “Do you wanna go out?”

“Where?” Stan asks quietly.

“We can call Kenny and Cartman and figure it out.”

Stan doesn’t move. Kyle sighs.

“I think getting out and doing something would make you feel better. The night isn’t over. It doesn’t have to be all bad.”

They pull back.

Kyle has his hands on Stan’s biceps. Stan still has his arms loosely around his torso.

“Okay,” Stan whispers.

He waits in the living room as Kyle makes quick work of throwing on his coat and gloves. Stan doesn’t ask him where his family is. He doesn’t really want to know.

The phone in his pocket chimes as Kyle sends a text in the group chat informing their other two friends to meet them at the bowling alley.

“I have two coupons,” Kyle explains. “You. Kenny.”

“You don’t have to cover me.”

“Don’t fight with me,” Kyle snaps. “You won’t win.”

Beneath his joking demeanor is a thread of seriousness, a thread of fondness.

Stan smiles, runs a hand through his messy hair unprotected by his favorite hat.

“Ready to go?”

Stan nods.

Before Kyle opens the front door, he turns around, points a finger at Stan’s chest.

“I want to tell you something later. Remind me.”

Stan blinks. “Okay.”

Cartman and Kenny meet up with them outside of the bowling alley.

The neon lights above them dye their skin pink and green. Kenny leans against the front of the building. Cartman stands beside him.

They look to be talking deeply about something, what with the movement of Cartman’s hands and Kenny’s patient gaze. His head’s tilted back against the wall, evidence of him truly listening to whatever Eric’s saying.

Stan doesn’t think he wants to know.

They turn when they near a little closer, Kenny’s face lighting up, Cartman snarling.

“Took you long enough,” he growls.

“Relax, big guy,” Kenny says as he pushes himself from the brick wall. “You’ll get your cheese fries.”

Cartman just huffs and slaps his hand off of his shoulder.

“C’mon, you idiots,” Eric says as he leads them into the bowling alley.

It’s not that busy. There are only a few lanes taken up but they generate enough noise to make the experience feel somewhat private.

“I'll get our shoes,” Kyle says. “Go get the lane.”

The other three wander over to lane five. Kenny sits down at the electronic scoreboard and begins to enter their names.

“Who are you feeling like this evening?” Kenny asks Cartman, currently standing to his right. “I’m thinkin’ you look like a ‘Bruce.’ Or maybe a ‘Howie.’ Oh I know! You could be an assassin named ‘Dogtooth.’”

When he goes to type it in, he’s momentarily disappointed to find that four characters is the max available for each name.

Kenny settles on four names four letters each that capture them completely:

SHIT

FUCK

ASSS

CUNT

“I wish I was CUNT,” Kenny says mock-sullenly, then pats Cartman’s shoulder, “but I feel like the energy you emit is way more ‘CUNT’-ish than I, ASSS, could ever manage.”

“You suck, Kenny,” Cartman huffs.

Down a couple of lanes, they can hear the crisp crack of a strike and the cheers that follow. They turn at the sound.

Stan really wasn’t expecting to see his ex tonight and on top of that, he had no idea the girls had their own bowling team.

Wendy, Bebe, Nichole, Red and some other girl he’s never seen before are dressed in customized bowling shirts. Their individual bowling bags are lined up on the bench. The balls on deck are shiny and sparkled, extravagant because they’re extra like that.

He’s pretty sure a few of them are taking community college classes. The one that doesn’t look all that familiar might be a friend come from the university in North Park, where he knows Wendy is going.

She could have gone somewhere worlds away, another state, another country, but Stan guesses she decided to stay close. He doesn’t know why; they were all ready broken up for a year when she got accepted to college.

Cartman stutters something about going to get those cheese fries. Kenny follows him, sucking back drool.

Rather than stand awkwardly alone at an empty lane, Stan jumps over the back of the plastic, pastel bench and walks over to the girls he once went to school with.

He kneels on the empty bench of lane seven and peeks into lane eight.

“Hey, kid.”

Wendy turns, smiles with something playfully sharp in her eyes.

“Look who it is,” she muses without any enthusiasm.

Red’s up to bowl. She takes a ruby ball in her hand and gives it an expert roll that consists of a twist of her foot behind her and and her back bowed down.

_Pop!_

The girls cheer at the strike.

“How long has this been going on?” Stan nods to the lane once Wendy steps up in front him.

“Why?” she says. “You jealous?”

“Confused.”

She rolls her eyes.

“It’s a school thing. We like to train here so the other teams don’t see what we’re working on.”

“A school thing?” Stan says. “I thought Bebe and Red were going to school here.”

“They go to North Park,” she says. “They just come back a lot. You didn’t know?”

“No.”

Wendy scoffs, looks behind her to quickly correct the way Bebe is twisting her wrist.

“Good job, girl!” she cheers when Bebe gets a spare.

Then she looks back at him with most of the joy wiped from her face.

“Just because you stayed behind doesn’t mean everyone else did, Stan.”

“I know,” he says. “Guess I was just trying to make myself feel not so left behind.”

She gives him a look that to anyone else would read as annoyance but he can see that caution in her eyes.

They were together for about two years, all of sophomore year, all on junior year.

They broke up in the summer when he found out she had been flirting and occasionally making out with someone else in their class; he can’t remember his name.

The day they had broken up, Wendy had been standing in his room with this sort of attitude of knowing she was in the wrong but not having the courage to fully admit to it.

“I’m not mad,” Stan said.

“What?”

“I’m not mad. About you and that guy. I don’t care.”

“You want an open relationship sort of thing then?”

Stan scratched the side of his neck.

“I don’t think I want a relationship at all.”

He remembers that Wendy had scoffed in a way that sounded like she had been somewhat shocked and hurt by the words he had said.

“Then you are mad at me,” Wendy said.

“No,” Stan said honestly. “I just can’t bring myself to care. And I don’t think this relationship can work if I don’t care enough about whether or not you go behind my back.”

Wendy only admitted the same sentiment only after Stan did.

Their breakup was a mutual decision.

Whatever was there before, whatever they had convinced themselves was there before, was gone now.

No hard feelings. No bad break.

They still give each other hell for stupid shit on the rare occasion that they see each other but it’s done in its twisted, friendly sort of way.

He looks at the unfamiliar girl now bowling just over Wendy’s shoulder.

She’s got long brown hair and dark gray leggings. Her ball is sparkly purple. Her name is painted in gold script above the three holes but it’s too far away for him to read it.

“She’s got a boyfriend back at school.”

Stan snaps his eyes back to Wendy’s. He keeps his hands on the back of the bench, leans back, leans forward.

“I didn’t say I wanted to hook up with her,” he says quietly, almost in a sing-song sort of voice.

Wendy smiles at him with her arms crossed over her chest.

“Boy, you really like to act like I don’t know you.”

And maybe she does know him because when Stan gets sad, he gets horny. Tears are hidden just behind his face as is his half-hard dick behind his zipper.

But he’s not the type to sleep around.

He only ever sleeps with those he’s in a relationship with and his last relationship was the one he had with Wendy.

Sometimes he considers it a curse that he’s like this.

“Are the other guys here?” Wendy asks.

“Yeah. They’re getting food and shoes or whatever.”

“It wasn’t your idea to come out, huh?”

“Nah, but I’m fine with being here. Think I need it tonight.”

It’s their schtick to bicker and fight just to get a rise out of the other but Wendy surrenders their strange game to look at him with a sort of compassionate softness in her face.

It’s the same look she’d give if she were remembering something in the past that was good at the time but had no place in the present.

“You look good without your hat,” she says softly.

Stan smiles up at her.

“I knew there was a reason we broke up.”

Her brow furrows again.

“What does that mean?” Wendy spits.

Stan shrugs.

He jumps back over the bench to his own lane and sits down next to Kyle who is tying his bowling shoes.

“That was Wendy?” Kyle asks with a glance to him.

“Yeah.” Stan slips on his bowling shoes. “She’s got a bowling team.”

Kyle bites the inside of his cheek. He nods, distracted.

“That’s kinda cool,” he mumbles but doesn’t sound at all sincere.

Stan hums and finishes up lacing his shoes.

Kyle steps up. He puts a lot of effort into the roll but it’s in vain as he knocks over only two pins.

“Dumbass!” Cartman belts with cheese on his chin.

“Shut up, fatass!”

Stan does a little better. He’s always been athletically adept, so with a strong arm and a decent roll, he gets a spare.

Kenny tries to get a laugh out of them by shuffling up to the line with his legs spread, bowling ball hanging heavy between them almost to the floor. He barely rolls, rather drops the ball with a loud thump.

It creeps down the lane criminally slow. They wait, blinking dumbly as it teeters back and forth but stays in the center of the lane.

A strike.

“Cheater!” Cartman chokes.

Kyle looks like he’s trying to work out in his head how that’s possible and Stan actually laughs.

“Lady Luck loves me,” Kenny says with a wink and his tongue flailing between the V of his fingers.

They guess she does because all of them try it on their next turn and all of them get gutterballs.

“Did you see the video?” Kenny asks while Cartman wraps up the third round with a split. “Craig’s stunt?”

“We can watch it tomorrow-” Kyle begins but Stan interrupts him.

“Show me now.”

Kyle gives him a look that speaks to his doubt of whether that’s a good idea at such a volatile time.

Kenny, ever observant, recognizes this and seems hesitant to present the video he’s loaded up on Cartman’s phone.

“Show me,” Stan repeats, voice and gaze serious.

Kenny smiles. “Of course.”

Cartman comes around the back of the bench just as Kenny starts the video. They watch together as Craig sits on the couch, his friends on either side of his feet.

Symmetrical and postured like a renaissance painting of trashy subjects, mouse traps glistening gold enter the frame.

Kyle hums quietly in props.

Thirteen traps in all clamp down onto the man’s fingers and head. Craig’s eyes are closed. His expression is one of blissful meditation. Laughter surrounds him but he’s not distracted.

Clyde leans on the couch, lost in a fit of laughter. Tweek sits back on his feet as he kneels on the floor, looking up at his boyfriend with a soft look that has Stan admiring internally just how much those two love each other before he can think better of it.

The camera work surpasses their own, what with the occasional zoom ins and shifting angles.

But then there’s a twitch of Craig’s eyebrow for a brief moment. His fingers move.

He remains mostly still but Stan recognizes those signs of subdued panic.

“He-” Stan begins but then Kenny is shushing him softly with a hand on his shoulder.

Craig opens his eyes. They flicker upward past the camera. Hidden in his hazel gaze is something familiar, something hurt.

He looks like he’s going to say something.

Then the video ends.

Stan stares at his own reflection in the black screen. He can see the faces of his friends around and behind him looking at him too.

He’s confused. He doesn’t know what to make of it. Impressive, yes, but what what was that last part?

“Well!” Kenny exclaims, making them all jolt. “They did a great job, didn’t they?”

Kenny rises and winks at Stan before stepping to the side to meet Bebe as she makes her way over to them.

“My Queen!”

Kenny sweeps her up so her feet are a few inches off the ground. Kyle and Stan’s attention shifts as Cartman speaks up.

“When do we answer them?” Cartman growls. “Those fuckheads?”

“Not right now,” Kyle says. “We don’t even have an idea, anyway.”

“Well, we need to get on it-”

“No we don’t,” Kyle snaps. “Not right now. We need to play our game and forget those idiots even exist. We’re having fun tonight. We’re not gonna be stupid.”

Cartman doesn’t push it, forgetting the fight as soon as he eats another forkful of fries drenched in cheese.

“You’re up, ginger,” he says without looking up from the bowl in his hands.

Kyle sighs, rises. He brushes his leg against Stan’s as he passes.

Kenny and Bebe giggle nearby over something one of them said. Kenny’s arm is around her waist. Bebe’s hand rests against his chest.

“You’re dating?” Stan supplies stupidly from the bench.

“What the fuck?” Bebe says. “We don’t have to be dating to fuck around.”

Kenny smirks as he leans into her.

“Stan’s different, Bebe,” Kenny says, the tip of his tongue flicking her earlobe. “Warm heart. Traditional romantic. Soft stuff before the rough stuff.”

“Jesus,” she says to Stan, “you must not get laid.”

Kyle finishes his bowl. Stan steps up for his turn.

The blue ball in his hands is heavy. He’s only in second but he wishes he was in first.

He’s always a little behind in everything, almost always there but not enough to be recognized for his efforts.

He wasn’t even quarterback in high school.

His coach had told him if only he had been in a better mood during tryouts would he have made him quarterback, made him a ‘star.’

Stan rolls the ball. It’s not a strike because why would it be.

Kyle steps into his periphery.

“You were gonna tell me something,” Stan says as he stares at the lane in front of him.

Kenny is occupied with Bebe and Cartman is invested in his fries and his ex and the all girls bowling team a few lanes down aren’t concerned with someone as pathetic as him.

This conversation between two best friends in full view may be considered private.

“I didn’t think you wanted to hear it back there,” Kyle says as he stands to Stan’s left. “I honestly don’t know if you want to hear it now. But I just wanted to say that I’m really...proud of you. For calling me instead of doing something dumb. That takes a lot of strength. And I’m glad you recognize that you’re strong enough.”

The girls down the way cheer. Bebe giggles. Cartman burps.

Stan turns his head to Kyle. Kyle looks back at him.

“Maybe I just wanted to do something dumb together.”

Kyle blinks, heat tickling at his cheeks and the tips of his ears.

“What?” Kyle sputters.

Stan looks down the bowling lane. He looks over his shoulder.

“Eric.”

Cartman nods his head upward, cheese still on his face.

“Start recording.”

“Stan,” Kyle says, “what are you-”

Then Stan’s stepping backward to get a running start before launching himself down the slippery lane.

His feet slide on the slick surface under him. He looks to be dancing the stupidest fucking dance ever poorly attempted.

He loses his balance after only two seconds of staying upright and promptly falls forward onto his stomach, chin hitting the floor and his teeth clicking together in such a painful way that it makes him giddy.

The momentum is enough to ensure Stan makes it to the remaining pins at the end of the lane, which he knocks over with his head.

He considers it a spare.

Stan flips onto his back and sees Kyle staring wide-eyed and open-mouthed from the beginning of the lane.

He honestly doesn’t know if Kyle will join him in, and just when he’s positive he won’t, Kyle steels, steps back and runs forward.

Stan smiles.

Kyle looks like he’s ice skating as he keeps his hands out at his sides in an attempt to keep whatever remains of his balance.

But he’s standing too straight and moving his feet too much. He leans to his left and the side of his foot hits the edge of the gutter. Kyle makes up for it by leaning too far to the right, which subsequently leads to his body twisting.

He lands on his hip and slips down the lane until he’s crashing into Stan.

Kenny, noticing the commotion, immediately drops his arm from around Bebe and sprints forward.

He doesn’t even try to stand. As soon as he’s past that painted white line, he’s stretching his arms out and sliding on his belly as if he were on a Slip n’ Slide.

He has to be going sixty miles-per-hour, smirking but determined as he speeds right toward them.

Together Stan and Kyle bellow laughter and try to brace themselves for the approaching impact, of which lands entirely on Stan as Kenny essentially headbutts his knee.

“Ow, fucker!” Stan hisses through his laughter.

“You’re saying ‘ow’?!” Kenny laughs as he rubs at the deep red mark on his forehead.

There’s wax on their backs and shoulders but they’re snickering and pushing at each other until they’re practically wrestling, sliding their feet wildly just to be extra difficult.

Stan’s leg is thrown over Kyle’s right shoulder. The back of Kyle’s head rests on his hip.

It’s strange the inopportune times when one feels the deepest intimacy but here, under the hood of a bowling lane, cramped against the wall, Stan smiles and threads his fingers through Kyle’s curls, holding him gently against him.

Kyle raises his own right hand and holds Stan’s shoulder behind him to keep him close.

Cartman stands at the start of the lane, still recording. His eyes flash from the screen to over it, observing in shock what they’ve just done. He shifts on his feet, swallows.

“Come on!” Stan yells for him like they’re back in fourth grade and they’re about to go on their next adventure.

Cartman looks around, huffs a curse, nods in defeat.

He keeps his phone out in front of him as if inspired to try his own hand at some impressive first-person camera angle.

The floor shakes with every step he takes as he jogs forward. Eric’s on his feet for half a second and then he’s falling forward and barrelling down the lane.

They cackle wildly as he forces them all backwards.

Cramped and sore and noses burning from all the dust and wax, they’re surprisingly comfortable.

Kenny hugs Cartman from behind as the cameraman swears and giggles. Kyle’s slid up a bit, complements of Eric colliding with him. He rests his head on Stan’s chest while the hatless loser holds him around his waist.

Stan smiles, laughs, leans his head back.

Tears stream down his face.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the anime beach episode

Clyde is the one to start this tradition.

One night three years ago, he had shown up on Craig’s front step with tears streaming down his face and his fists clenched at his sides.

It was the third anniversary of his mother’s death. It hadn’t gotten any easier.

And as if the horror of his mother’s death wasn’t enough, his aunt had decided to call him up and unload blame upon him for killing her.

Tweek and Craig had stood staring in the doorway, each of them melting at the sight.

As much as they desired to take him into their arms and hide him away from the entire world, they just as much wanted to bust Clyde’s aunt’s windshield.

Before Craig could tuck him under his chin and before Tweek could thread his fingers in his hair, Clyde was looking up at them with stormy eyes and speaking up through his heartbreaking sobs.

“Please,” he plead, “please get me out of here.”

They packed their bags immediately, picked up Token and left on a Thursday at eleven pm out of South Park.

It was like running away without all the repercussions. They’d be back by late Sunday but they left quietly and in the middle of the night, no one but each other.

They didn’t know where they were going.

They just knew they were going north.

An hour and fifteen minutes later at the very northern edge of North Park, they found a state park hidden away behind cover of tall trees sprinkled with snow.

Come summer, it would most likely be overrun by rich families sailing boats on the lake and racing jet skis but for that weekend in mid-winter, it was empty.

It felt like a secret kept away from the rest of the the area, a paradise hiding behind the guise of a menial state park.

They rented a cabin deep in the middle of the wooded property. They slept in and woke up in time to eat lunch at the small restaurant in the front lodge.

In between bites of hamburger and sips of soda, the four of them ingested the tabs of acid Craig had procured conveniently a day before their surprise departure from South Park.

The snowy trails seemed more interesting an hour after the paper had dissolved on their tongues.

The bark of adjacent trees seemed to glitter. Every few feet stretched on for miles. The white ice under their feet seemed to be swirling in soothing vortexes.

Clyde and Token balanced on the thin ice of the river while Craig and Tweek leaned against each other with their gazes set on different aspects of nature surrounding them.

Craig remembers thinking that if the afterlife looked anything like this, Clyde’s mom was in heaven.

“Are you crying?”

Craig had turned to Tweek. He blinked slowly. He reached up to touch a pearl of warm saltwater on his cheek below his cold eyelashes.

“Oh, baby,” Tweek had said as he wrapped his arms around his boyfriend. “Baby, everything’s okay.”

And it really did feel that way as long as they were all together, all alone.

But day turned to night and so did Clyde’s emotional state.

He was suddenly quiet again and when Craig turned to him and asked whether he wanted to shower first, he was weeping.

That night, none of them had slept separate. They piled into one bed, Clyde in the middle of them in their desire to keep him safe.

He slept with his teary face hidden in Craig’s neck, Tweek spooning him and Token spooning Tweek.

Soft breath, natural touches, warm under the covers.

Together, they didn’t fear the dark.

For the next three days, they were off the grid and gone from their weirdass families.

They recuperated as a unit by getting in touch with themselves and each other. It was quiet and private and very much needed.

They returned to their shitty lives eventually but kept in the back of their mind that there existed a place seemingly made just for them for when they needed to get away.

Tweek called them together three months later after he found out his grandparents would be staying in his home for the weekend.

Token called them two months after that, exhausted in every way after finals week.

Craig called it five months later the night after he got arrested for trespassing and vandalizing school property.

It’s been at least a year and a half since they had been to their secret getaway.

Craig is now the one now to summon them.

_North Park. Tomorrow morning. Meet up here._

It’s a rule not to ask why they’re there. If not explicitly said, it should not be mentioned. The whole point is escaping life, so don’t bring it up.

Even then, Craig knows he isn’t being as discreet as he would like given the fact he and Tweek have been tense the past week.

They’re not fighting. They’re dancing.

Around an issue neither of them necessarily want to have a conversation about at this time. They’re both busy with work and they were both high at the time and none of that shit meant anything but…

It did.

Because Craig’s soft question whispered in the darkness of their bedroom, in their bed, held within it a seriousness that terrified Tweek.

The more he thinks about it, the more he thinks that question has always been in his head, just under the surface.

He had said it. He doesn’t want to take it back.

The next morning after their mouse trap stunt, Craig woke up to an empty bed and a text from Tweek reminding him he was gone to work.

No kiss. No goodbye. Not even a, ‘ _sleep well dumbass,_ ’ and a pillow thrown at his head like he sometimes did when Craig refused to wake enough to properly send off his boyfriend.

Craig had stayed in bed a long while before calling into work and saying he was sick because he kind of was wasn't he? Wanting to marry his boyfriend? Commit his life to another person forever?

_Fuck._

As much as he wanted to be disgusted with the fact of settling down and being a normal, functioning member of society, he couldn’t.

They’d do it their own way.

He and Tweek would make this mess their official home, maybe adopt a cat together and a guinea pig. They’d invite their friends over for takeout dinner and slow dance in the living room to metal music played on the sound system they’d saved up for together.

Maybe Craig would pick up guitar again and Tweek could paint, because he fucking could even though he didn’t believe he had artistic potential.

Craig sighs.

He’s not regretful. He’s glad he said it. But now he has to face the consequences and that’s never been his forte.

So instead of talking about it, they’re going to North Park.

Craig and Tweek stand on the cracked driveway as Token pulls up in his land rover. A black backpack hangs off of Craig’s left shoulder. A dufflebag filled half with clothes and half with board games hangs off of Tweek’s right.

Token and Clyde give them a tense look as they step up to the car but they’re all smiles when they open the doors.

“Good morning,” Token says.

Craig grunts, still tired.

Tweek closes the door to the backseat and Clyde is all ready offering him a bite of his granola bar.

Craig is a little tense but he feels better once they start moving, even better when they merge onto the highway.

They listen to a radio talk show mostly in silence, Clyde quietly rambling a story about some girl and Tweek picking at his nails as he looks out the window.

Token will look over at Craig every now and then in a way that seems very analytical.

Craig closes his eyes to escape the silent questioning and only then does he realize just how tired he’s been.

Sleep has been fitful. He thinks he’s been having dreams but he always forgets them once he’s woken up.

Craig’s head drops forward.

He shakes himself awake from his mere seconds of dozing. He sighs and positions his head back up.

A hand holding a hoodie breaches the narrow hole between his seat and the passenger window.

Sandwiched between the glass and Craig’s head, the sweatshirt smells like Clyde: cheap cologne and mildly headache-inducing deodorant.

He dozes in and out to the sound of the radio and the scent of his best friend.

A thirty minute power nap does well to energize him. Craig wakes with a clearer mind and his hands planted on the car ceiling as he stretches.

“Nicole talked to me the other night,” Token says.

“Coool.”

“She was with Wendy and the bowling team. They’re going to state at the end of the month.”

“Good for them,” Craig drones.

He takes a pack of cigarettes from his back pocket and packs them against the heel of his hand.

“Nicole told me Stan was there.”

Craig’s eyes slide over to him, now darkly interested.

“He’s trying to get back together with Wendy, then.”

“No, no.” Token narrows his eyes. “At least I don’t think so.”

He won’t say it aloud. None of them will.

It’s none of their business but they’re not fucking blind.

“They did their stunt.”

“At the bowling alley?” Craig asks.

“Yeah.”

“You saw it all ready?”

“Yeah.”

Craig looks over his shoulder.

Tweek and Clyde have on headphones, both plugged into Tweek’s phone through a jack splitter.

Clyde texts. Tweek draws in a sketchbook on his lap.

When Tweek notices he’s being watched, he smiles at his boyfriend softly, almost as if he’s unsure if it’s the right thing to do at a time like this.

Craig answers with a hand held out behind him.

He feels fleeting fear at potential rejection but Tweek’s hand grips his own and the feeling is chased away by one of much needed relief.

Craig leans his head back on the headrest. Beside the car, signage and sparse trees speed by in a confusing blur that is less and less familiar with each passing second.

“Should I watch it right now?” he asks after a brief spell of silence.

Token’s eyes are set on the highway ahead of them but the wariness in them is noticeable.

“Only if you want.”

Craig uses his right hand to log into the website on his phone. He tugs on Tweek’s hand with his left once the video is loaded.

Clyde and Tweek rip the headphones out of their ears and lean in close so the three of them are temple to temple.

At first the image of Kyle and Stan is far away.

“Where’s his hat?” Clyde asks.

His black hair is similar to Craig’s, but just a little messier and undecided in which way it wants to sit, let alone grow. It adds to his overall demeanor of perpetual clumsiness.

And he is clumsy.

Stan suddenly sprints down the lane, or attempts to, before his feet slide out of the limits of his control and he’s falling onto his face. He crashes against the remaining pins with a crisp crack.

They seem to all find it surprising that Kyle is the next to go. He clearly hesitates but then he’s giving in with a shift of his shoulders like he can’t not follow.

Craig knows that feeling, he fucking does.

It’s part of the reason he finds himself in this car right now.

Clyde gives a little gasp as the camera suddenly shakes and pushes forward in a first person shot recorded so sloppily that one would believe for a second that they themselves were slipping down the lane in a moment of pure stupidity.

“Did they get in trouble?” Tweek asks once the video ends.

Token exhales a scoff.

Craig turns off his phone.

They resume to how they were as they begin to attempt to make sense of all of this.

Craig’s main question is whether or not it was planned. Maybe Stan said fuck it and decided to run down a path he knew was too dangerous for him, or maybe it was always planned out

Stan’s stupidity has grown to such an incredible precedent that it would beg the consideration of an actual stroke of genius.

Craig’s gut quickly dismisses the idea and affirms his initial point of view that this was as unexpected for Stan and his friends as it was for Craig and his friends to watch.

Craig’s brain, however, hangs onto every little piece of the video, trying to find sense in nonsense.

Sometime during in his pondering, he thinks he’s unearthed an undercurrent of mocking, as if Stan were challenging him further by insisting they make fools of themselves not only in the privacy of their own homes, or even their little corner of the internet, but in actual public.

“I’ll give them props on the camera angle, but I think we can do it better.”

Mischievous glee seeps from Clyde’s cat-like smile as he reaches into his own backpack and holds up a small waterproof camera that straps on to one’s forehead or wrist during any physical activity.

“Where’d you get that?” Tweek says as he toys with the strap with his unoccupied hand.

“My dad got it for me like two years ago but I didn’t have anything to record back then.”

“Nothing?” Craig says. “You strike me like the type to wear something like that during sex.”

Clyde scoffs. “I’m not kinky like you two are.”

“We’ve never recorded ourselves having sex,” Tweek says.

“Really?”

“Well, we’re not the best looking people. I think it’d kill my boner if I had to see my eye bags-“

Craig leans his head back. “Or my crooked teeth.”

“-on camera.”

Clyde throws his head back. He groans.

“Sometimes I’m convinced you guys are fishing for compliments. Neither of you are ugly.”

“Kiss ass,” Craig reprimands. “I know I have fucked up teeth and you’re telling a fucking lie if you say I don’t. I’m lucky I got anyone at all with my smile. Tweek’s next boyfriend’s gonna have the straightest smile in the world, you watch.”

“‘Next boyfriend’? What the fuck are you talking about?”

Tweek’s voice is serious.

Craig is quiet as he stares forward, tendrils of self-loathing stretching through him.

They release the other’s hand, not because of the conversation but because of the way their palms are getting sweaty.

Craig takes the opportunity to slip a cigarette between his lips. He lights it.

“No smoking in the car,” Token says.

“I wish I didn't have to but I suffer from an addiction.”

Token rolls his eyes and then rolls down the passenger side window.

A pathetic whimper sound from the backseat.

“What's Clyde cryin’ about?” Craig murmurs.

“Needa piss.”

Token turns off at the next exit and pulls into a small gas station. Clyde wins speed-walker of the year award on his way out of the car and through glass door.

The rest of them enter at their own leisurely pace, taking time to stretch and yawn and shuffle their feet against the sluggish flow of blood to their legs and the fresh assault of freezing temperatures squeezing through the islets of their tattered shoes.

Tweek buys a bag of candy. Token buys a bag of chips. Craig buys a tin of dip.

This is a vacation, after all.

Clyde holds Token up by the wall of fridges at the back and asks him what bottle of lemonade he should get. Token counters with, “None,” on account that he doesn’t want to stop again.

Craig leaves out the door. Tweek follows him.

They don’t wait in the car but lean against it. It’s quiet between them and after so long together it’s usually comfortable but this time it feels strange and unnatural.

Who knew small talk with his boyfriend would be hard.

Everything’s a little harder all of a sudden.

Maybe Craig feels a little guilty.

He can’t form the words that are in his throat:

 _I know. I don’t know what’s happening either._ But _I don’t regret it. And I’m sorry I don’t._

“How was work?” he says instead. “Yesterday.”

They didn’t really talk yesterday.

They haven’t really been talking much at all.

“It was fine,” Tweek says. “Kevin came in and ordered a fucking pumpkin spice latte.”

“That dumb bitch.”

“I wrote it on his cup.”

“Dumb bitch?”

“Stupid ass.”

They laugh together quietly.

It’s still early in the morning and the sun is shy. It peeks from behind wispy gray clouds and illuminates Tweek’s back so he’s glowing with the natural light.

“Can I kiss you?”

Tweek smirks softly up at his boyfriend. It feels like they’re on their first date all over again. Craig remembers it. Out by Stark’s Pond. Cold. It’s always cold there.

But Tweek’s lips had been warm.

Craig wishes to feel them again especially after their unspoken distance these past couple of weeks.

“My breath is kinda gross,” Tweek says. “I mean, I brushed my teeth and everything but that was at six.”

“I like grody breath.”

Tweek smiles. “I know you do.”

He holds one of the yellow braids of Craig’s hat as their lips meet and then move together.

The air is cold. The sunrise is warm.

Tweek’s breath has a distinct taste but Craig doesn’t consider it at all bad.

“Can I pet your dog?”

Clyde’s loud mouth interrupts them.

He’s standing a few parking spots down from their own beside a pickup truck. The man standing outside of it is lean but muscular and frankly generous in the way he entertains their friend with a brisk nod.

The Australian Shepherd at Clyde’s feet pants happily up at him and wags its tail as he pets it.

Craig’s initial thought is to yell at Clyde to leave that guy’s dog alone and get in the car but the cargo in the bed of the man’s truck has him coming closer.

“Cool bikes.”

There are four of them lined up and tethered down by thin bungees. They’re small, classified as ‘minibikes.’

Once placed on the ground, they’d only reach as high as their knees.

“Yeah, I’m on my way to the flea market to sell them,” the man says. “None of them really work, or they need too much work that I don’t have time for. I’d rather sell the parts than hold onto the pieces of junk.”

He tells them the red one has a broken chain, the blue has a busted brake line and the orange and silver have something busted in the engine.

None of it deters Craig who asks for the price.

“For the four of them?” the man says. “I’m thinking eight hundred.”

“They’re not worth eight hundred if they’re broken.”

They haggle back and forth, Craig eventually wearing him down to four hundred for the the four of them.

He’s reaching for his wallet when suddenly there’s a hand on his shoulder.

“I got it,” Token says because Craig is the one who called this trip and four hundred dollars is nothing to the man with millionaire parents.

“But-“

“It’s fine.”

Craig keeps quiet as money exchanges hands.

Each of them grab a bike and wheel them to the back of the car. Clyde loudly claims the red one. Token asks Craig if he can fix them.

“Easily.”

The next time they stop for Clyde to go piss, because of course they do, they take the opportunity to drive up the street to an auto parts store.

Craig pays for it this time, mostly to keep the all ready growing guilt of putting his friends out from getting too much to bare.

The remaining car ride passes quickly in pleasing punk songs playing on the radio and snacks passed between them like a game of hungry hot potato.

When Token pulls into the state park, Craig actually exhales a breath of gratefulness.

No one’s in the lodge when they pick up the cabin key. No one is driving down the snowy, narrow roads as they head deeper into the property.

It’s just them and that couldn’t be more perfect.

This cabin isn’t one of the same cabins they’ve had in the past but it’s similar enough to ease Craig’s frequent anxieties of alienation.

Tweek and Craig put their bags in one bedroom. Token and Clyde put their stuff in the other.

The separation now doesn’t guarantee that they won’t all end up in one bed.

Craig doesn’t want it to come to that, but he feels like it’s out of his control.

He steps into the bathroom while his friends continue down the hall on way to the living room excitedly.

There’s mold in the shower and a spider sitting in a web in the corner of the window.

Craig stands in front of the mirror hanging above the sink. He takes off his hat.

He looks a little of a mess but not in an obvious way. It’s as if everything was off just so that someone not himself wouldn’t be able to put a finger on it.

He’s a little paler. His eyes are a little darker. His hair is just a little messier, but he’s keeping it under control.

Craig drops his head. He sighs.

The point of this trip is to relax to his utmost ability, cut all ties to everything he’s been worrying about for the past two weeks.

Craig splashes water on his face. He scrubs his eyes.

He blinks at himself in the mirror, face wet, and wonders if the whole purpose of the trip is defeated by the fact that Tweek is here.

In the living room, a portable speaker croons a soft song as Tweek and Token sit at the wood picnic table feet from the stove.

They’re playing some kind of card game mostly silently, only speaking and snickering over particularly well-played moves.

Clyde’s head ends up in Craig’s lap as he sits on the sofa.

“Still gets a little gunked up every now and then,” Clyde murmurs as Craig scratches the dried up pus from the ball of his eyebrow piercing.

“That’s because you’re a dirty ass.”

Craig’s fingers move around the ball absently, moving without a thought as he combs over Clyde’s eyebrow with the pad of his thumb.

Clyde stares up at him.

He has that look, some kind of look like he can tell something’s wrong, like he wants to talk about it.

Craig stops the path of his finger.

He leans his head back on the couch and looks to his left to the wall.

Craig closes his eyes at the feeling of the back of an index finger gently and barely-there stroking his side.

They stay as they are for the next hour until Tweek is declaring victory with a laugh and a playful groan from Token.

It’s only five pm so they all rise, dress in their swimsuits and redress in their jeans and coats before walking out the door.

“The lady at the lodge said they added a new hot tub to the pool,” Clyde says.

“And what else was she saying?” Token says. “It has four types of jets?”

“Something like that.”

The rabble is comforting as is the consistent thump of their feet on the empty street.

Craig pulls the tin from his back pocket and unscrews it. He takes a pinch of tobacco between his thumb and forefinger and deposits it between his gums and bottom teeth.

His head all ready feels light.

“I hate when you dip,” Tweek says.

“As if I didn’t all ready fucking say that I have an addiction,” he says before he can think better of it.

Craig spits a wad of brown onto the pavement to cure the tense silence but it ends up coming off disrespectful.

“Disgusting,” Tweek says. “Spit in this.”

He dumps the final sips of water from his water bottle onto the ground and hands it to his boyfriend.

Craig spits in it begrudgingly.

“Mom and dad are fighting,” Clyde says, voice lilting dramatically.

Craig blinks stupidly as if only now recognizing how the situation looks.

“We’re not fighting.” Craig looks at Tweek. “Are we?”

Tweek sighs through his nose. “No.”

Craig spits a total of eight more times before they make it to the pool building.

The water bottle feels heavier in his hand.

The tobacco in it like tar swims and swirls disgustingly.

“We’ll just drink that for our next stunt,” Clyde says. “Should I do it?”

Craig rolls his eyes. He throws the water bottle away in the trash can outside of the door before Clyde can grab it.

They probably wouldn’t come here if the pool wasn’t indoors.

The warm room smells of chlorine and is lit in a non-offensive way. It’s easy on the eyes, maybe looking like a spa more than a public pool.

“Just us.” Token sounds thankful.

Clyde slips off his shoes. “We’re lucky fucks.”

They undress together at a bench. They’re standing close enough that their elbows bump against each other’s, shoulders brushing occasionally.

This close intimacy soothes Craig but he doesn’t show it.

A single file of swimming trunks step to edge of the pool. Their toes hang an inch off and over the water. All of them are eager for this baptism that will cleanse them of the shit they’ve been dealing with both individually and collectively.

They jump together.

Silence of the cool water surrounds him. Craig’s body is weightless. His arms rise minutely on either side of him. His toes curl and he feels gone from the world.

He peeks his eyes open a little to see his other friends ascend to the surface but he stays a little longer, longer, just enough so his throat gets tight and his chest burns.

Craig is the last to come to the surface.

When he does, he’s light-headed.

Tweek and Token go off to inspect the new hot tub at the far end of the pool.

Clyde swims up to him with his whole his body underwater and his chin and head atop, looking fully like a Chihuahua mid-dog paddle.

“Hold me like a bride,” he requests as he swims into Craig’s arms.

Craig accepts him without thought.

Clyde smiles up at him with that dumb smile that makes Craig’s blood warm and his muscles relax.

He wants to keep his eyes open but they flutter shut as soon as Clyde rests a hand on Craig’s bare chest.

Craig opens his eyes and finally smiles when Clyde twists one of his nipples jokingly.

Off in the hot tub, the jets bubble and Token and Tweek’s voices echo as they muse over how great it feels.

The atmosphere surrounding them is what Craig needs.

He wishes he could bottle it.

Craig looks down at Clyde in his arms, listens to the laughter of his boyfriend and one of his best friends and tries to commit to memory this time right now.

He’s almost overcome with sadness as much as he finds refuge here because he knows it won’t last.

Just as he enjoys this right now, so is time passing, one second by one second ticking down to the end of the weekend.

“Hold your nose.”

Clyde does so without question.

Craig bends his legs a little, brings the arm under Clyde’s shoulders down and the arm behind his knees up.

He flips him backwards smoothly.

“What did he answer right?” Tweek asks as he swims up.

“I didn’t ask him a question.”

The couple kisses briefly.

Craig now takes Tweek into his arms and holds him. His body is still warm from the hot tub, magma in the cool of the water and the ice of Craig’s skin.

Craig wants it to stay like this, whatever this is right here.

Tweek looks like he’s about to say something but Craig silences him with his lips against his once more. The passion there burns hotter than Tweek’s skin.

It’s overdue and Craig thinks they’re both starved for each other after these two weeks.

“Craig,” Tweek says and his voice sounds mildly worried, desperate to talk about it but knowing that Craig never will.  

And then Craig’s grip loosens around him so he’s no longer holding him. Tweek stands on his tip toes.

Clyde jumps up, clings on Craig’s back. Token wades close by, wrapping an arm around Tweek’s waist and holding him up a little so he’s no longer battling with staying above water.

“Can we play Stars?” Clyde asks against Craig’s shoulder.

Craig sighs. He smirks. “Get over there.”

“Is it a new movie?” Token asks once they’re all lined up against the wall across from Craig.

“Yes.”

“Is it horror?” Clyde asks.

“Yeah.”

“Did we watch it two weeks ago?” Tweek says.

Craig smiles, reaches out a hand. Tweek grins as he swims to him. As soon as he reaches his hand with his own, Craig pulls him in.

“No fair,” Clyde says through bubbles as his mouth is half-underwater.

They stay for another three turns of Stars and then a somewhat half-assed competition of who can hold their breath the longest.

Tweek makes them stop before Clyde passes out as Clyde has been challenging them all in quick succession and consistently stays the longest underwater like he has something to prove.

Craig and Clyde the last to get out, Token and Tweek all ready showered and dressed by the time they shuffle across the floor.

Tweek tells them to shower while he and Token start dinner.

Craig kisses him goodbye and although it doesn’t obviously seem like it, it lingers.

Craig and Clyde step into the shower together, still in their trunks.

It’s cramped but Craig doesn’t at all mind.

He enjoys the feeling of Clyde’s back brushing against his chest and the way his head nudges his chin, but he’d never admit it.

So close together, Craig can make out purple and yellow spots on the fronts of Clyde’s shoulders and biceps that the warping of the pool water previous must have obscured.

“What is that?”

Clyde looks down to where Craig is pointing at his bicep.

“Oh, I don’t know. Bruise.”

Craig pushes on it.

“It doesn’t hurt,” Clyde says.

“Where’d you get it? A girl?”

Clyde smirks, scoffs. “I haven’t been with any girl.”

“A boy?”

“Craig, I’m not gay.”

Craig actually smiles. “Not even bisexual?”

“No.”

“Yeah right.”

Clyde, the little scrapper he is, decides now is the time to try and wrestle his friend. Craig makes sure to brace himself on his feet well enough to make Stan Marsh and his friends jealous.

“Watch it,” he laughs when Clyde makes a little jab at his side, ducking, weaving.

And then Clyde’s moving forward and holding his arms around his best friend’s waist in a grip that is loose and no longer challenging.

The water fallen from the shower beats on them in a comforting consistency that may only be achievable here. It trails down their skin and between them, warm, pleasant.

Clyde rests his head on Craig’s collarbone.

Craig’s fingers twitch.

He raises his hand and lays it feather-light on the back of his head. He can feel the flutter of Clyde’s eyes shutting as gentle as the water rolling off them.

“You better wash your piercing,” Craig reminds him when he pulls back and begins to wash his face.

Clyde laughs.

They finish up, the both of them losing their swim trunks right before turning the water off so they can be completely free of any chlorine lingering on their bodies.

By the time they’re dressed and leaving the bathroom, they’re starving.

Clyde is dramatic with it, saying he’s sure he’ll pass out and he somehow ends up on Craig’s back.

“You’re sooo heavy,” Craig groans dramatically, stomping his feet down purposely loud with every step so long that it might be considered a lunge.

Clyde flicks his temple. “Liar.”

Craig continues down the street as the last of the sun sets behind snowy hills covered in tall pine trees efficiently blocking out the world.

The weight on his back is good. The arms hanging past his shoulder and out in front of him are good. The breath fanning by his ear is good.

He smiles.

“Ahoy, friendo!” Clyde calls to where Token’s sitting in a lawn chair by the camping grill outside. “What do you think of my new sea vessel? I’d say he’s has a little bit of an attitude problem, but other than that, he gets the job done.”

Craig lets him slide off his back. Clyde hurries inside with the complaint of it being cold and how he’ll be helping Tweek cut up the vegetables and prepare the sides.

Hotdogs and hamburgers sizzle over glowing orange coals.

Craig opens a lawn chair fetched from the trunk of the car and sets it beside Token’s.

Token’s always been quiet and Craig thinks it might be because he’s frequently not causing trouble. He takes it in stride, for the most part.

“Hamburgers and hot dogs tonight?” Craig says, trying to start conversation.

“Yup.”

The fire crackles. The wind whistles.

Craig had gone over to Token’s a few nights ago to pick up his charger he had left.

He let himself in through the front door and entered Token’s room after giving two warning knocks.

He was somewhat shocked by the image of clothes covering the floor. The bed was a mess of knotted sheets piled up. His desks was cluttered with a mess of sweaters and towels, his laptop dead and the television off.

Craig refuses to believe that the bottles full of yellow liquid on the floor between the left side of the bed and the wall were piss because this was Token and Token didn’t piss in bottles.

He hadn’t said anything then. He says something now because he needs something to ward off the silence.

“Is your room always that dirty?” Craig asks even though he knows the answer.

“You’re one to talk.”

“I thought the maid cleaned your room. Or did you tell her to fuck off?”

“She comes in two days.”

“You need her to come now.”

“Do you have to be such an asshole?”

The reaction is a little unexpected.

It wasn’t his intention. Craig’s just… like that.

He’s quiet as Token stands and transfers the hamburger patties and hot dogs to a plate.

“C’mon,” he says and Craig follows him inside.

The lights are brighter in the cabin.

There’s only one lamp, so they rely on the overhead light. Tweek’s hair glows golden under it where he sits at the table, head propped up on his hand in front of a chess board.

“Play a game of chess with me.”

Craig throws a leg over the bench and sits down.

“I’m not good at chess,” Craig says.

“You’re fine,” Tweek assures.

Craig moves first. Tweek answers, navigating every chaotic and ill-planned move with a sort of grace.

“Don’t do that.”

Craig looks up at him. “What?”

“Don’t do that. Don’t move that bishop.”

“Why?”

Tweek reaches over to point.

“If you move the bishop to C4, look what happens there. I capture it with my queen, which puts you in check, and then you’ll move your king up, which is the only way you can move it and then I’ll capture it with my knight.”

Craig blinks.

“So don’t move that bishop, baby.”

He doesn’t know where else to move. It feels like his only option.

Craig’s fingers hover above the bishop. His middle finger twitches.

“Everything’s ready,” Clyde says. “Let’s eat.”

The game is over without a definite end as both Craig and Tweek rise to make their plates.

After dinner, they wheel the bikes inside.

Token leaves to bed first, progressively quiet throughout the evening until he’s simply sitting there, distant. Tweek too shuffles off to bed but not without a quick question to Craig if it’s okay or if he wants him to stay up with him.

Craig says it’s fine. Tweek nods, kisses his cheek and hugs Clyde briefly.

Clyde is as bright and bushy-tailed as ever. He watches excitedly as Craig begins to work on the bikes, helping him fetch certain tools or parts when he asks for them.

The knowledge Craig uses now comes from his job.

Craig has a love-hate relationship with it. He enjoys the paycheck but he hates the implication.

It’s all very macho; if his father knew he was a mechanic, Craig’s sure he’d be smug about it.

He just really hates making his old man proud in any capacity.

Craig will admit he still gets a little spun around and perplexed when seeing a whole vehicle function as a whole but up close, focusing on one section of an engine at a time, he can begin to break it apart and in that way learn how it works, learn what it’s built on, and then be able to piece it back together.

He’s been told at the garage he’s a natural, and maybe he’s good at what he does but it’s not for him.

Craig tightens a loose bolt on the orange bike and considers hidden dreams he wishes he could fulfill.

He’s still young. He’d think this was the time to pursue whatever stupid dreams he has but for some reason it seems like all his time has run out.

Tweek stirs as Craig slips into bed.

Craig spoons him, holds him close, brushes his lips against the back of his neck.

Tweek hums, sleepy, knowing.

He turns to face his boyfriend and the moment they’re in front of each other, they’re joining their lips with a hunger they’ve only recently remembered.

Craig’s fingers dip under the hem of Tweek’s shirt.

They slide across his stomach, up his ribs, back down his sides.

He wants to go on about how smooth and warm and beautiful he is but he disallows words to slip from his own mouth, once again in a long line of words held to himself.

They’re stored somewhere in his chest.

They’re heavy.

He can feel them with every harsh breath breathed against Tweek’s neck.

There are hands touching his sides and a murmur in his ear but he can’t hear the words.

Craig shivers.

“Get under the covers,” Tweek whispers. “Come here.”

But he’s not cold.

He doesn’t say so because he never has anything to say.

Craig falls asleep with Tweek’s hand on his chest and the feeling of his breath against his shoulder.

He dreams of something but in the morning, he can’t remember it.

Craig peeks down the hall on the way the bathroom.

Token is curled up under the covers with his back to the door. Clyde’s mouth is open a little, his arm hanging off the bed.

Craig closes the door as quietly as he can.

Tweek’s still asleep when he gets back. The comforter has fallen to his hips. His shirt’s ridden up a little throughout the night.

Craig leans down to press a kiss the exposed strip of skin of his lower back.

“Hm?”

The smile is Tweek’s hum is evident. He turns his head, blinking awake, smirking as he reaches out to his love.

“I’ll make you some coffee and we can go on a walk?” Craig says, hand holding Tweek’s.

“I’d like that,” Tweek murmurs and Craig kisses a line up his spine.

Nature here is frozen in a singular blanket of white ice, pillowy, gentle. The sky is a comforting gray as the sun is stuck behind a wall of clouds shedding a steady but light flurry of snow.

It snows back at home. This is different.

It’s a love affair, fleeting kisses of small flakes, curious touches of cold slipping under their clothes.

Craig never knew weather like this could hold within it so much emotion but he knows it now as he walks through the forest twinkling and glimmering with the ice that covers every inch of the ground.

“I wish you would sing again.”

Craig stops all noises he’s emitting.

He didn’t even know he was humming.

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” Tweek murmurs as he licks the snow from his bottom lip. “I just wish you would sing more. You used to. What happened?”

That’s embarrassing.

Back when he was younger and only had a couple of chords at his disposal, Craig would write songs for Tweek.

Some of them had words.

The best ones didn’t.

He’d hum instead through flicks of certain strings and a chorus of chords dancing with each other.

Up and down and moving forward like a wind through the trees, Craig’s humming managed to convey the purest love he possessed for the one he considered his other half.

Even though his voice would occasionally crack and the lower sung notes would end up gravelly, Tweek would sometimes tear up but always tell him that Craig was his favorite singer to exist.

Craig doesn’t sing anymore.

He hasn’t sung for years.

“You were working on a demo,” Tweek says and it sounds like he’s disappointed with the fact that Craig isn’t working on one anymore.

“It sounded like shit.”

Tweek steps up on a snowy rock. He turns to look at his boyfriend stood below him.

“From what I remember, it didn’t.”

“You’re my boyfriend. You’re supposed to say shit like that.”

“I _am_ your boyfriend and I only say the truth.”

Tweek’s every breath crystallizes in the air in front of him in a gentle haze. It smells of hazelnut coffee and toothpaste.

Before they dated, Craig used to be scared of Tweek.

Downright terrified.

He never let it show because that’s just how he was, but internally, he feared most everything about Tweek like how smart and amazing he was.

Craig considered Tweek to be infinitely cooler than him and the moment the blonde boy would come around, he would shut up out of fear of saying something stupid.

Here they are, years later, best friends, lovers.

Never would Craig have thought that there would come a time where they would be this close.

It frequently feels like a dream.

Craig hopes he remembers this one when he finally wakes up.

Through the snow, Craig shuffles forward. He stops in front of his boyfriend standing above him and gently rests his left temple against his stomach.

Tweek doesn’t say a word but slips his hand underneath Craig’s hat and threads his fingers in his hair.

They wander a little further down the trail. The sound of snow falling is soothing to the pair of them, a quiet secret.

They stop when they come to an outlook over a snowy ditch. They stand idle, looking down, around.

Tweek takes advantage of the silence.

His next words spoken are done so cautiously.

“I know you don’t want to, but I think we should talk about it.”

“Talk about what?” Craig says, willfully playing stupid.

“Why we’re here.”

Craig would like to think he’s subtle in the way he nervously freezes but Tweek has known him for so long that it doesn’t get past him.

“They don’t know why we’re here,” Tweek says. “I do.”

He speaks with nothing but truth in his voice and it’s almost like a defeated, disappointed sigh.

“Craig, we can't.”

The wind blows cold.

“Why can’t we?” Craig whispers, voice as soft as the snow.

Tweek breathes an exhale through his nose sounding like disbelief.

“We’ve been dating for five years now,” Craig says. “Almost six. We’ve known each other through the roughest patch of our lives.”

“And you know that our past has been the roughest patch of entire lives?”

“My dad fucking hospitalized me, Tweek.”

“I’m not discrediting that. It was horrible for you and I know you suffered during that time and I’m so sorry you did,” Tweek says. “But you have to recognize that we’re dealing with new problems.”

“New problems? Everything is fine.”

“Then why are we here?”

Neither of them interrupt the silence that immediately follows.

Craig doesn’t have words but even if he did, he couldn’t trust the fact that whatever was uttered next wouldn’t break some kind of balance in the universe.

The air is too fragile.

It’s hard to even breathe.

“I don’t know what you’re feeling,” Tweek says. “And I wish I knew. I fucking wish.”

He shakes his head. He gives Craig a look in his desperation to understand.

“Life is timing, Craig. I don’t think this is the right time to be talking about marriage. We’re so young.”

“I’m cold. I want to go back to the cabin.”

Tweek, surely sensing Craig’s anxiety, steps forward.

Craig steps back.

He’s looking back the way they came like he’ll bolt if Tweek tries so much as another inch closer.

Craig’s scared all over again.

Terrified.

“Yeah,” Tweek whispers. “Let’s go.”

There’s a considerable gap between them as they walk back to the cabin. Not a word is spoken.

“Hey, where’d you guys go?”

Craig pushes past Clyde in the doorway and walks into the cabin.

Behind him, he can hear Clyde question about his behavior and Tweek make an excuse that he’s not feeling well.

Craig tries not to slam the bedroom door but it ends up sounding like it anyway.

He takes off his hat and throws it on the bedside table. He falls in the middle of the bed. He curls in on himself.

The bed feels frighteningly big when it’s this empty, especially when he’s right in the middle of it. Craig wishes he wasn’t alone here but he can’t bring himself to form the words and call for them.

The alarm clock half-obstructed by Craig’s hat reads six-thirty pm when he wakes up.

He’s slept the entire day away. It looks like it’s midnight outside.

A sense of embarrassment falls over him. He tries his best to shake it before walking out of the door and down the hall.

Craig enters the living room and immediately Clyde’s at his side like a little puppy.

It’s clear by his enthusiasm that he was advised to not bother his friend in the bedroom and now seeing him again is very exciting.

“Hey, you fixed the bikes right? Let’s go ride them! We’ll test them out around here!”

But they can’t ride them around here. The pavement is much too wet and icy. They'd bust a chain or skid off the road and break a bone.

Tweek is sitting at the table. He gives a small glance in Craig’s direction but looks back down at the game of solitaire strewn out in front of him.

By the look on his face, he’s losing.

The chess game from the night before is pushed to the end of the table. It’s untouched.

“Oh, come on, Craig!” Clyde whines when Craig sits on the couch. “Dude, it’ll be fun!”

The noise is too much and the energy radiating off his boyfriend is tense and awkward and it makes Craig sick but he’s alone in all of this, never mind the fact that he’s here at their little weekend retreat, he’s still alone and nothing will change that, noth-

“ _All right.”_

It comes out louder than he intended.

His fist is balled up on the armrest beside him. His eyes are momentarily squeezed shut.

When Craig opens his eyes, he can see Clyde standing quiet in front of him, Token peering at him from the armchair, Tweek in his periphery, studying him.

Craig swallows. He nods and tries to play it off.

“Yeah, we’ll ride them. We can do it right now. We’ll take them in the car and go out and find somewhere to ride them.”

There’s an awkward beat before Tweek is rising and saying something about getting his shoes.

He disappears down the hall and then Token and Clyde are following after him to get their shoes from their bedroom.

As soon as they’re gone, Craig grabs the camera from Clyde’s backpack by the door and discreetly tucks it into his waistband.

They put the repaired bikes in the trunk. Token goes to grab the keys from him. Craig closes his fist.

“It’s fine,” Craig says. “I’ll drive.”

There isn’t much promise around here.

They drive down wet, empty streets reflecting bright light of the signage above.

It feels like they’re in some kind of dystopian world illuminated solely by artificial light.

It’s somewhat breathtaking.

Still, it solidifies the idea that all asphalt is effectively too slippery to speed on.

At the end of the street is a twenty-four hour grocery store boasting low prices. The parking lot is mostly empty, only about three or four cars sparsely parked.

Craig pulls in. He parks halfway to the door.

His friends meet him at the trunk as he pulls out the blue bike he has deemed his own.

“Grab the bikes,” Craig says.

“But the parking lot-“

“We’re gonna ride them inside.”

“What!?”

His friends are looking at him with wide eyes and open mouths.

“You’re joking,” Token says.

“What? No I’m not. C’mon, let’s go.”

They hesitate but ultimately relent, each of them grabbing their desired bikes and depositing on the pavement.

“We’ll get kicked out, Craig,” Tweek says. “We’ll be banned for life.”

“This is North Park. We can make some trouble and get the fuck out. It’s not like we ever have to come back to this store. Nothing serious.”

“But the police in North Park _are_ serious, Craig.”

“I don’t want to be arrested,” Clyde mutters pathetically and Craig can see all ready the shimmer of tears in his eyes.

Craig looks to Token, Tweek, reaches out a hand to hold Clyde’s cheek.

“I won’t let anything happen to any of you.”

He takes the camera from his waist and slides the headband around Clyde’s head.

Craig presses the button on top.

The light goes red.

They saddle up on each of their respective minibikes, all facing the grocery store.

Now Clyde seems unsure. Of course he does.

He reaches over and pumps Craig’s handbrake, once broken, now fixed.

“And you’re sure this works?”

“A handbrake is the easiest thing to fix. Of course it’s fine.”

They all pull their pull strings until the engine turns.

The grumble arising from beneath them is all ready exhilarating.

“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” Token says.

But they don’t have time to sit around and stress over it because their engines are roaring and they’re pulling back on the gas and racing inside through the open doors.

Everything is a blur.

Craig almost doesn’t realize what’s happening. One minute he’s outside in the glowing cold and next he’s under fluorescent light racing across shiny tile.

It’s not crowded, thank goodness, but the patrons that are present gasp and get out of the way.

They can’t stick together; the aisles are too small.

Instead, they split up and branch out.

It’s a high speed game of hide and seek as each of them disappear down an aisle just to pop out in front of each other, sending them all into fits of breathless giggling peppered with cheery curses of, ‘ _Oh shit!’_

Craig smiles and exhales small shocked laughs as Clyde speeds past him.

Each twist of the gas chips away at the terrible feelings licking at him.

He accelerates faster and Craig’s mind begins to blank. Nothing else exists but this moment right here where the braids of his hat are fluttering behind him and an engine is roaring between his feet.

Craig rushes down the back of the store past cuts of salmon on beds of ice. The chill and adrenaline makes him shudder.

Up ahead he can see Token round the corner out of the soda aisle and head straight for him. They each drift a little to the right so they can avoid a collision.

Token extends his left hand. Craig does the same.

They high-five each other near forty miles an hour.

Craig turns the corner just as Clyde comes speeding out of an aisle.

Clyde clips a stand of potato chips.

Individual bags of barbecue and sour cream and onion chips explode forward with the acceleration and fall all over the floor. Clyde joins them.

He slides across the tile, his red bike on its side beside him.

Concern twinges in Craig’s chest. He prepares himself to slow and aid his friend, but Clyde’s only on the floor for two seconds before he’s hurrying back on his bike and speeding off, feet barely beneath him.

If Stan wants them to look like idiots in public, easy.

They look like idiots every time they show their faces in public because they are unapologetically different.

Craig passes Tweek over by the produce. The younger employees they pass smirk at them and laugh while the older ones bat at them with brooms like they’re rats racing across the floor.

The soundtrack of gurgling engines is decorated with bouts of laughter as the store manager tries to chase after them all in vain.

Craig squeezes the hand brake as he makes it to the refrigerated section.

The bike doesn’t slow down.

In a mere second of realizing, a cold sweat falls over him.

He tries to put his feet down. It’s no use.

The front wheel crashes into the open refrigerator. Craig flips forward and into the shelves of cheeses.

“Fuck!”

Craig’s hand is hot. He looks down to see blood cascading down the side of his hand from a vertical gash on his pinky.

“We gotta go!”

Clyde’s waving at him, standing with the bike sandwiched between his calves.

Token and Tweek hear the commotion and circle around the refrigerated section, blinking at him and the blood now smeared up his arm and on packages of shredded cheddar as he pushes himself up.

The store manager, still wielding a broom, runs toward them.

“The police are on their way! Hey! Stop!”

Craig ignores the pain and gets back on his bike. His friends turn sharply and book it to the exit.

The air conditioning feels good. His hand fucking hurts.

Craig moves faster, faster, barreling outside without any regard for the fact that there’s no way for him to stop.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long wait. Enjoy!

Stan can’t believe he’s doing this.

He’s not ashamed about being here, he just never thought that he would make it to this point.

It frequently felt like most of life was far away. He guesses he would equate his feelings now to how he felt when he got his driver's license: unsettled at the reminder that time was indeed passing and it wouldn’t wait for him. 

Honestly, he never thought he’d accomplish that much.

Stan tugs at a loose thread on the front of his apron. His hands are red from washing dishes. He kinda thought they wouldn’t hire him when he dropped off a half-filled in application. 

He’s sad to say that he was very wrong.

Late nights like this, Village Inn foregoes busboys and only keeps two waiters and a single chef on duty.

After two weeks, things have gotten easier. 

The first day was the worst.

The diner was relatively busy and his trainer had a major attitude. She harped on him relentlessly, chiding him about not knowing how to work a cash register and then laughed maliciously in his face when he admitted this was his first ever job.

The place, like most on South Park, functioned quietly unfair in terms of its employees and their God-given rights. Dan, his boss, had informed Stan he wouldn’t be receiving a break during his shift unless he was a smoker.

“Isn’t that, like, illegal?” Stan had asked. “I thought employees had to be given a break regardless if they were smokers or not.”

Dan smacked his gum. “So you’re not a smoker?”

Stan exhaled deeply through his nose. “No.”

That night he waited a table of rambunctious drunks who mocked him and gruffly voiced their bitter attitude at his inexperience.

Then there was a group of high school kids on a mean streak. They complained about their food, treated Stan like he was stupid and then snickered behind his back. They ended up leaving behind their jackets, umbrellas and copious amounts of water spilled across the table over broken open packets of sugar.

Stan had gritted his teeth and bit back tears as he wiped up the mess, only rectifying the situation in his mind as he considered taking home their abandoned items and feigning ignorance if they ever came back and asked for them.

In the midst of his mounting internal chaos, a familiar group of three strided in. 

“Hey, dude!” Kenny said as they sat down at a table to the right of the front door. “Busy huh?”

“Y- Yeah,” Stan said as he gave them all menus.

Kenny and Cartman delved into the many choices but Kyle kept glancing at him warily. Sometimes Stan hated that Kyle knew him so well. 

“You’re pretty cute in the whole get up.” Kenny rested his head in his hand and gave him a devilish smirk. “Wanna take a break and meet me out back in five?”

“I don’t get one,” Stan mumbled. 

“What?” Kyle furrowed his brow. “You don’t get a break?” 

Stan shook his head. 

“Dude, that’s illegal as hell. Get your manager and I’ll tell  him-“

“No! Please!”

Kyle shut up at Stan’s desperate plea. In his hushed voice were the frayed ends of his resolve. 

“It’s fine, Kyle. Just- I- I don’t wanna get in trouble. It’s fine, okay?”

Kyle stared up at him as Stan reached into his apron pocket and pulled out a pen and a pad of paper. There was a beat of awkward silence as Stan stared at the notepad in his shaking, red hands.

“W- What can I get you?”

Kenny and Cartman ordered a stack of pancakes. Kyle didn’t order anything but stared at his friend in that Super Best Friend way, of which made Stan feel vulnerable and found out.

When he looked out to the dining floor from the kitchen window, Stan could see his friends and suddenly he felt like he was seconds from failure, disappointment, total embarrassment worse than could ever be achieved during any stupid stunt. 

“I’m gonna take a smoke break.”

“I thought you said you didn’t smoke,” Greg, the cook, said but Stan was all ready out the back door. 

The night was cold as always but this time it felt as if there was no oxygen on the planet left for him. 

Stan leaned against the brick wall behind the diner, a hand over his heart and broken breath huffing out of his mouth. 

“Mm, hnn, eh-”

He really thought he was sick, felt worse than sick, like his entire body was falling apart. He knew he couldn’t leave work on his first day. His shift was only starting. All of this was only starting.

Stan felt like the world was ending.

He flinched at a figure approaching on his left side. 

Kyle stood in the snow, brow furrowed in deep worry before rushing over to his friend’s side. He didn’t touch him but obviously wanted to with how his gloved hands ghosted Stan’s quivering biceps. 

“Breathe,” he urged over the sound of Stan’s painful heaves. “Breathe.”

Stan did, but it was shaky and choppy and pathetic.

“I can’t do this,” Stan choked out. 

“Yes, you can,” Kyle countered immediately. “This is one of the easiest thing you’re ever gonna do. I promise.”

Stan squeezed his eyes shut. He shook his head.

“No, it is,” Kyle assured, soft but unmoving. “Remember when we fought ManBearPig? That was hard as fuck. He killed Satan! And what about when we dealt with Cthulhu? We’re still here, dude. And you’ll still be here after today. This is nothing.”

Stan peeked his eyes open. His chest was still jolting painfully with the spasms of his once hyperventilating lungs. 

“No,” he murmured. His voice was broken and hoarse. “All of that was easier. You were with me.”

Kyle blinked. The silence of the night was only interrupted by the harsh pace of Stan’s breath. Snow gathered in their eyelashes and hair. Kyle’s hands twitched over Stan’s biceps.  

“I’m with you now,” he whispered. 

Stan swayed strangely, his arms moving forward before falling back to his sides. He didn’t know if he wanted their foreheads to meet, their fingers, didn’t know if he wanted to hold or be held.

He opened his mouth but no words escaped. Stan met Kyle’s caring eyes once more and then slid out from in front of him and left back inside without another word.

They didn’t stay to eat. Kyle requested they get it to-go. That would be the last time they ever attempted to dine at Stan’s place of work, not for their own sakes but his. 

“We don’t want to be distractions,” Kyle would say later but Stan knew better. 

By the time they informed Stan at the end of his first shift that he would be working most days and the night shift no less, he was too tired to fight them.

He had nodded weakly, eyelashes still wet and harsh hiccups stuck in his chest.

Stan doesn’t think he’ll ever fully get used to the late nights but he’s no longer sprinting outside to shake and choke. Tonight, two weeks after his first day, he’s thankful for the feeling of boredom.

He waits a booth of high schoolers. The boys have their arms thrown over the shoulders of the giggling girls. The entire time, Stan finds himself distracted as the sight reminded him of a time when he was in their place.

He had been hopeful then. 

He doesn’t have a reason to not be now but he simply doesn’t find himself aspiring toward anything worthwhile. 

They leave without giving him an adequate tip or even a glance, and Stan doesn’t exactly blame them. He wishes he was a better person back then.

The clock reads eleven when Betty, the other waiter on duty, walks past him at the sink and informs him that the loiterer is back in the parking lot trying to sell counterfeit purses.

Stan cranes his head around the corner and sees through the large glass window at the front of the diner a man leaning against the driver’s door of his pickup.

“Go tell him to get out of here,” Betty says, voice sharp. “I’d go but I’m not going out in the cold!”

She laughs harshly and pats him on the shoulder, no concern or consideration of how he too doesn't exactly enjoy the cold.

The man is skinny but gruff. A thick, gray mustache hides his top lip. He stands outside of his truck with his hands in his pockets and angles himself to whoever is passing.

Black trash bags are piled in the bed of his truck. Some overflow with purses and jackets. Stan’s sure if he were to really look, he’d find other things more illegal than just fake accessories and attire. 

“Hey, you need to go,” Stan says. “You can’t do that here.”

The man’s mustache wiggles. He stands up straighter. “What? What am I doing? I can’t stand here?”

“You can’t sell things out here. This is private property.”

“I’m not bothering no one.”

“Please leave,” Stan says, exasperated and shivering. 

The man turns his head halfway away from him and pretends he isn’t even there. Stan grumbles and marches back inside. 

He shivers all the way to the front door and books it to the kitchen to warm up by the stove currently cooking a pot pie. 

A faint knock sounds against the large, metal backdoor at 12:01. Stan opens it to a gust of cold wind and a friend standing in orange.

“Whatta we got tonight?”

It’s become somewhat normal for them. Stan felt overwhelming guilt after seeing just how much food was thrown out on a nightly basis whether it was delivered to a table too cold or someone changed their mind at the last second.

He had forced himself to try to eat as much as he could but had ended up puking in the bathroom, only for Dan to inform him soon after that bathroom breaks were not paid.

Kyle had always said he was was an easy puker, but maybe that’s only because a majority of the times he’s felt nauseous have been when they were hanging out together.

Once Kenny had caught wind of this dilemma, he had offered to lighten his burden of food waste.

Stan passes Kenny a plastic bag warmed by its packaged contents. “Chicken fried steak and a side of mash potatoes. Apparently it wasn’t warm enough and they made us remake it.”

“Bougie motherfuckers,” Kenny says with a shake of his head.

“No kidding.”

The cold doesn’t feel too bad now considering Carlos is firing up the grill to cook a few hamburgers for some truckers on their way to Arizona. He takes a deep breath and things seem less chaotic, if only for as long as his inhales are freezing and his friend is here in front of him. 

“Any chance you’ve seen my sister at all?” Kenny asks.

“No,” Stan says. “Why? She’s not staying with you?”

“She hasn’t been staying with us for, like, almost half a year now.”

Stan didn’t know that. He kind of feels bad for not knowing.

“Where is she?” he asks.

Kenny shrugs tensely. “Last I heard she was staying with one of her friends but I honestly don’t know. Just keep an eye out for her?”

“Yeah, of course.”

Betty calls his name. Stan glances over his shoulder with a sigh. The heat is creeping up on him again and everything speeds up messily. 

“I gotta go, dude,” Stan murmurs. 

“Oh shit. Bye, bye, bye.”

Kenny hurries forward for a quick hug and brief kiss on the cheek before high-tailing it out of there, cold chicken fried steak in hand.

The next night, it’s Friday and Stan is somewhat light with the fact that it’s his last day of work for the week.

Before his shift, he had gotten a text from Kenny saying that Craig had uploaded a stunt video three days ago. Stan watched it as he got dressed in his dingy uniform smelling of sweat and soup. He was surprised by the impressive camera angles and the lengths to which they went for public humiliation.

Stan’s hands held the hem of his shirt tightly as Craig slammed into a shelf of cheese. His stomach twisted when a thick stream of blood smeared along his forearm where it flowed from his hand. 

The color was vibrant under the refrigerator’s lighting. It made him feel like something was different, like something was changing.

It scared him.

The video is still on his mind as Stan walks through the parking lot, but it’s irrelevant to him the moment he catches a faint whiff of cigarette smoke halfway to the front door. 

He stops for a moment. He inhales deeply. 

Menthols.

Stan only knew one person to smoke menthols. 

He’s distracted by the memorable smell when suddenly he’s interrupted by a coffee pot being shoved into his arms. The clock reads midnight. Betty gives a nod behind him. 

“More coffee to the emos.”

Stan whips his head around and sets his gaze on the crescent-shaped booth in the corner of the establishment. 

Those aren’t emos, no; Stan knows this by their heavy boots and long coats and their identical expressions of apathy.

Memories come flooding back to him with such a ferocity that he forgets where is for a second.

Stan’s somewhere in the past, behind the school, smoking cigarettes in the backseat of a car at midnight, in bedrooms smelling of incense and lit by red candles. 

The emotion accompanying these recollections are more than confusing. When he snaps out of it, he catches an embarrassing expression of deep thought on his face.

Stan shakes his head, takes a deep breath and crosses the floor. 

Black coffee cascades into white mugs without a drop hitting the tabletop. He’s gotten better but no one is patting him on the back.

The goths look up and then do a double take, not exactly expecting to see their ex-friend filling up their mugs.

“Hey, guys,” Stan says in an attempt to cure the awkwardness.

“Hi, Stan,” Michael grumbles. 

“Hello, Stanley,” Henrietta says sounding just as put out.

Pete murmurs something silently. He doesn’t look up from where he scratches at imperfections in the wood table. A subtle smell of menthols rises from him.

“How are you guys?” Stan asks.

“Well, we’re having coffee at 12 am in a shitty diner,” Michael says. “Life’s peachy.”

Stan gets it. He’s here too. 

His eyes move from the mug below him back to Pete. He’s still interested much more in the table than his old friend. A streak of his hair is still red. 

“So, where's the little one?”

“Not so little anymore, is he?” Henrietta says. 

Oh yeah. Time’s passed. Fucking time. 

He doesn’t know Firkle’s age for sure but after this long, he’d be a teenager now. 

Stan was almost as tall as Michael at the time they hung out together, and given he was the newest recruit, was given the task of carrying the kid around.

Firkle would end up on Stan’s back whenever his new pair of black boots began to give him blisters or if he hit his cigarette wrong and felt nauseous.

The kid was funny. Stan wonders where he is now.

“He hangs out with your friend’s little brother.”

Oh.

“Does he still hang out with you-”

“Or did he abandon us like you did?”

Stan’s surprised by the ball of guilt suddenly swelling in his stomach.

The expression on Pete’s face, even as he keeps his eyes set on the whirlpool of coffee in his mug as he stirs it, holds within it a deep rumination, as if he had been thinking about this fact for a long while.

They used to be friends. 

Yeah they were weird and did weird shit like read old poetry clunky with vocabulary Stan didn’t understand or talk about how sucky life was, but there were plenty of times of genuine happiness.

Pete would paint Stan’s nails black and joke about how he had horrific cuticles. He’d help him apply eyeliner and laugh when he flinched from the dull point. 

Henrietta would teach Stan how to French inhale, or at least attempt to. His clumsiness and sloppiness at trying to inhale as flawlessly as her was cause of hearty laughter that had them sprawled across the floor. 

Michael would listen to new goth music with Stan, the both of them aweing over certain synths and generally being music nerds as they commended brave vocals.

Stan still has some of the albums Michael gave him. He tries to French inhale every time he smokes. He surely misses having his nails painted.

If only they knew what that time meant to him.

“We see Firkle every now and then, but not as much as we used to,” Michael says. “He still wears black if that’s what you mean.”

There’s no one else in the diner except the goths. Stan places the coffee pot on the table. He wipes his hands on his apron. 

“Do you, uh, mind if I sit down?”

They look at each other. They look up at him. They shrug. 

Stan slides into the crescent booth across from Pete and Henrietta, Michael on his right.

“You just got this job?” Henrietta asks. 

“Yeah.” Stan taps the table with his hands. “Really recently.”

“We haven’t seen you,” Michael says.

“So you guys still come here a lot then?”

“Don’t be patronizing,” Henrietta spits.

“I didn’t mean to be,” Stan says truthfully.

There’s a flash of belief on their faces at his statement and that’s only because they know him. All his life, Stan’s always been kind, goth or not. 

It frequently feels like a curse.

Pete is fiddling with a deck of cards Stan hadn’t noticed until now. He cuts the deck and slides the two halves together smoothly, still avoiding eye contact as he fidgets with what Stan recognizes as quiet nervousness.

Stan reaches a hand forward, palm face up before he realizes what he’s even doing. “May I?”

Pete stops the motion of his hands. He glances quickly at him, gives a quiet huff and places the deck in his ex-friend’s hand.

The deck isn’t a usual deck of cards but rather homemade tarot cards. The artwork beneath the slick top coat of each individual card is hand-painted on both front and back. Intricate detail, interesting composition of the subject and multi-color inks demand the full attention of the beholder. 

Stan holds The Sun card close to his face. Gold leaf has been applied expertly on the outermost rays of the sun’s reach. 

“You painted these?” Stan asks, awe trickling into his voice. 

Pete averts his gaze to out the window.

“That’s awesome, dude.”

The goth rolls his black-rimmed eyes but bites the corner of his lip and picks at his nail polish. Stan passes back the cards. Pete looks more comfortable with them in his hands.

“Could you give me a reading? If you don’t mind, of course.”

Pete finally makes eye contact with him and Stan’s stomach is robbed of any shitty feeling at the sight of his hazel irises. 

“You have time?” Pete says, his soft voice possessing definite edge and annoyance that Stan knows from experience is natural for him. 

Stan nods before finding the words, “I’ll make time.”

They push their mugs of coffee aside to make room for the impromptu reading. There’s a slight spill on the table from their first round of coffee and Stan wipes it up with the rag from his apron pocket. 

“So how accurate is this stuff?” Stan asks. “I've never done this before.”

“Depends on who’s doing it,” Michael says. “Pete’s pretty good.”

Stan smirks as Pete shuffles the deck three times. 

“I’ve actually read one of your friends before,” he says absently.

“Who?” Stan tries keep any telling emotion from his voice.

“Kenny,” Pete says. “When I read him, the cards insisted he was already dead. A reading’s never one hundred percent.”

He places the deck on top of the table facedown. 

“Cut it.”

Stan does.

“One for you,” Pete says as he pulls the card off the top and places it face down on the table, “and one for each of your friends. You have three of them, don’t you?”

Stan nods.

Pete pulls three more cards and sets them in a row beside the one already on the table. He turns the first one.

The man’s stockings are painted bright pink. The cliffside drips like wax. The dog biting at the man’s feet has its fur outlined in delicate, black ink strokes. 

“ _ The Fool _ .” Stan groans and wipes a hand down his face. “That’s totally fucking embarrassing, but what else would it be? Fuck me.”

Henrietta dabs her mouth with a napkin. Michael takes a sip of his coffee. Pete’s the only one to genuinely smile at his comment. 

“So I’m a big dumbass is what that means, right?” 

“Well…” Pete starts and Stan’s groan of building embarrassment almost erases the wonderful giggle that sounds across the table. 

Stan’s glad he doesn’t miss it.

“Okay, yeah, kinda,” Pete says. “It is representative of risk-taking and general recklessness but it’s also spontaneity. And the beginning of new things in your life.” 

Stan mulls the information over internally as Pete’s nail polished fingers drift down the line of cards and begins to turn them over. 

The Magician. The High Priestess. The Lovers.

He looks up at Pete at that one. Pete’s already looking at him.

“So,” Stan says softly, “what’s the damage?”

“Well, basically my takeaway is that all your friends are dealing with their own shit, but who fucking isn’t?” Pete traces a finger down the side of The Lovers card. “Be a good friend. Or try to be. That’s my advice.”

Stan wasn’t there for these three, was he? Maybe at one time but not anymore. He wonders if they’re all okay. He finds himself actually concerned with the fact.

“Okay,” Stan murmurs. He’s still staring at Pete. 

He wants to apologize. He doesn’t. 

Betty is calling him again and he looks over in the direction of the kitchen, waving at her.

“Thanks for the reading.” He stands. His ex-friends look up at him. “I won’t charge you for the refills.”

The rest of his shift is weird but oddly comforting. Stan finds a strange stability in the goths’ presence. He glances their way every few minutes. They’re talking but smiles are rare and Stan gets it but as long as they’re in the corner, he’s more inclined to relax. 

“Bye guys,” Stan says after they’ve paid the bill and are heading to the door. For some reason he’s feeling a little sad and he decides goodbyes fucking suck. “I hope you don’t stop coming here because of me. I promise I won’t bug you for readings every time.”

Henrietta and Michael wave dismissively but Pete is a few steps behind them. Stan’s fingers twitch. His hand moves a fraction of an inch forward but he catches himself.

“It was nice seeing you.” Pete turns his head and blinks up at Stan’s unexpected words. He’s at least a whole foot shorter than him. “Have a good night, Red.”

Pete doesn’t nod, doesn’t say a word. The corner of his mouth twitches upward but he does not smile. 

Stan’s next breath reaches the bottom of his lungs. 

The feeling is gone five minutes later when he spots a familiar face in the parking lot.

“Are we doing this again? Man, you have to go.”

The hustler throws his hands up in the air as Stan walks up to him. “I’m trying to make a living!”

“I understand that, but maybe there’s somewhere else you can do it.”

The man crosses his arms. “I’m not leavin’ until I make some money.”

Stan sighs through his nose. 

He focuses his sights on the black trash bags in the bed of the truck, the majority of contents unknown to him. Stan shifts his jaw and narrows his eyes.

“You have any fireworks?”

The man blinks owlishly.

“Yeah,” he says. “Why?”

Stan reaches into his pocket and pulls out a wad of tips from yesterday night. “Give me a bag of them. Whatever you have. Preferably nothing that would blow up a house.”

Twenty dollars later and Stan is rifling through a plastic bag of sparklers, M80s, Roman candles and bottle rockets. 

“Stay right here.” The man takes a step back in the direction of his truck. “Dude, relax; I’m not calling the cops. Just, stay right here.”

Stan runs back inside and comes back out less than ten seconds later. He holds out a paper application to the man. 

“Fill it out,” he says, a little out of breath. “The work’s a little boring but the tips add up. Maybe you’d like it better than standing out here in the cold.”

The man, thoroughly perplexed, nods slowly. 

“Maybe,” he murmurs. “Thanks.”

Stan’s undoing the knot of his apron behind the counter when Kyle walks through the door.

“In a good mood?” Kyle asks, his smile matching his friend’s.

“I always am when I get off.”   


“Aren’t we all,” Kyle murmurs. Stan snickers and thinks maybe Kyle’s been hanging out with Kenny too much.

It’s the end of his shift and he’s pulling on his coat over his uniform and leaving out the door so quick, it’s like he doesn’t even know the place. Kyle keeps up beside him and although he said he would never dine at the Village Inn again, has taken to meeting him on Fridays at the end of his shift. 

“How was work?” 

Stan goes to say how he had seen his old friends but stops himself for reasons he doesn’t completely understand.

“Fine,” he says and keeps it at that. “Just glad it’s the weekend.”

Stan passes the plastic bag to him. Kyle opens it. He gapes.

“Shit, dude. Where’d you get these? Aren’t fireworks illegal?”

“It’s our stunt,” Stan says. Kyle looks hesitant. “What Craig did wasn’t any more illegal than this.”

Kyle’s brow furrows as he looks through the bag again. Stan’s smile falls.

“What?”

“I’m just hoping this isn’t gonna go the way I think.”

“What way is that?”

Kyle stops walking. Stan stops a little ahead of him, turns. “I don’t want to get arrested, Stan. I’m a failure but not a complete failure.”

Stan frowns. “You’re not a failure.”

Kyle rolls his eyes and begins walking again.

Together they call Kenny and devise a plan and meeting place for their next stunt. Ten minutes later, they’re all here.

No one comes around here on the off season. The parking lot sits at the center of a ring of soccer fields now covered in snow. Cartman sits on his own bicycle at the middle of the lot next to Stan’s bike on the ground. Not wanting to be outdone, Eric wears an elastic strap around his head of which holds his phone for a first person perspective.

“You look like an idiot,” Kyle says.

Cartman sputters and spits out a string of insults, wobbling on his bike with the rage that shakes him.

Kenny stands beside him, wearing a black crop top and a tight pair of orange short shorts. Striped socks are pulled up to just under his knees. His roller skates are raggedy but the wheels light up.

“Look at you,” Stan says.

Kenny spins smoothly before striking a pose, both arms in the air. “I’m finally living out my dreams of being a rollerskating diva!”

“And you’re not cold?” 

Kenny winks. “Not with a body as hot as this.”

Their plan of action is medieval.

They’ve split up and are positioned at opposite ends of the parking lot. Kenny holds in his right hand the other end of the rope tied to the back of Cartman’s bike. Kyle stands on the back of Stan’s, his left hand on Stan’s shoulder.

The camera is recording. Their smiles dwindle down to nothing.

They’re in the headspace now, that weird mindset where nothing matters but this right here right now. Two teams of two people each stare each other down like the Old West. The serious, smoldering expression comes to Stan so easily that it’s frightening.

There was a thought he had before that maybe this was weak. These bikes weren’t as fast as Craig’s. They didn’t nearly look as cool.

But fire…

Fire made everything better.

It’s nearly synchronised how Cartman and Stan both ignite their respective lighters to light the bouquet of Roman candles in their team member’s free hand. 

The fuses sizzle. Kyle’s fingers bury into Stan’s shoulder and a confused excitement courses through his blood. 

Stan’s giddy with the combination of complex feelings of the stunt right now and of the night as a whole and he’s yelling to the men on the other side of the lot.

“I challenge you! To a jousting match of the hottest caliber!”

“Let’s go, dickhole!” Cartman yells back.

Stan peddles as fast as he possibly can. Kyle holds the fireworks out ahead of him and then holds steady. They approach each other quickly and he can see Cartman pulling Kenny behind him, the rollerskating star’s stance surprisingly intimidating as he bends his knees and lunges forward a little. 

Balls of fire explode from the fireworks in their hands. Stan can feel the heat whizz past his face, catch his earlobe, graze his cheek. The fireworks pop like a stuttered heartbeat and echo in the air. The bright light illuminating the night highlights their crazed smiles.

Stan hears swears in front of him, behind him and the hand on his shoulder tightens. 

“Fuck!”

He skids to a stop as soon as they’ve passed each other. Cartman and Kenny have fared well but Kyle’s hand leaves Stan’s shoulder as he steps off the bike. 

He’s holding his cheek. Where he takes his fingers away is irritated red. The beginnings of blisters bubble up along his cheekbone. The skin is already beginning to peel and it looks painful. 

“Shit,” Stan says. “ Dude, are you okay?” 

He doesn’t think before reaching out a hand to gently touch Kyle’s cheek. 

Kyle blinks hurriedly, and it’s clear by the shape of his lips that he’s biting on the inside of his cheek. He isn’t rendered silent by pain but what Stan thinks is surprise at the light touch on his face.

There’s something in their eye contact that feels revelatory, but Stan can’t identify it, just knows that in this state of heightened adrenaline and panic that it’s really something.

The four of them all whip their heads up the street at the sound of distant sirens.

Before they can even register it, Kenny is gone. They know he loves them but he’s gotta look for himself and his family. Who that is anymore is Stan’s guess considering his sister is MIA. He might just be selfish and Stan doesn’t blame him. They watch as Kenny roller skates away, practically sprinting. 

Cartman is the next gone. It’s surprising how fast he moves on his bike. He stays seated the entire time he pedals but he still has that flighty nature instilled in them as kids to bow out when shit gets real.

Stan leaves the bag of fireworks on the pavement and runs over to the bike where he left it flat on the ground. He honestly doesn’t know if those sirens are for them, probably not, but he doesn’t want to risk it.

“Kyle!”

He’s holding his own face and wincing. He turns to see Stan on the bike and jogs over half-heartedly, jumping on the back of the bike and placing both hands on his shoulders.

“Fuckin’ hurts, dude.”

“I know, I know, but we gotta go. Hold on.”

Then he’s gone, pedaling the opposite way of the police sirens dying in the distance. He turns left, right, ducks down an alley and into a neighborhood that isn’t too far from their own.

Kyle holds tight on his shoulders and there’s that feeling in his stomach again, his lungs, blood.

Stan swallows roughly. 

He feels like The Fool, but not for the first time tonight. 


End file.
